The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [63]
“When I have a Saturday and Sunday to myself, I’m happy to stay home, reading Dominican history,” she says, and it seems to her that her father nods. “A rather peculiar history, it’s true. But I find it restful. It’s my way of not losing my roots. Even though I’ve lived there twice as long as I lived here, I haven’t turned into a gringa. I still talk like a Dominican, don’t I, Papa?”
Is there an ironic little glimmer in the invalid’s eyes?
“Well, more or less a Dominican, one from up there. What do you expect from somebody who has lived more than thirty years with gringos, who goes for weeks without speaking Spanish? Do you know, I was sure I’d never see you again? I wasn’t going to come back, not even to bury you. It was a firm decision. I know you’d like to know why I changed my mind. Why I’m here. The truth is, I don’t know. I did it on impulse. I didn’t think much about it. I asked for a week’s vacation and here I am. I must have come for something. Maybe it was you. To find out how you were. I knew you were sick, that after the stroke it was no longer possible to talk to you. Would you like to know what I’m feeling? What I felt when I came back to the house of my childhood? When I saw the ruin you’ve become?”
Her father is paying attention again. He is waiting, with curiosity, for her to continue. What do you feel, Urania? Bitterness? A certain melancholy? Sadness? The old anger reborn? “The worst thing is that I don’t think I feel anything,” she thinks.
The front doorbell rings. It keeps chiming, vibrating in the heat-filled morning.
8
The hair that was missing on his head jutted aggressively out of his ears in jet-black clumps, a kind of grotesque compensation for the baldness of the Constitutional Sot. Had he given him that nickname too, before he rebaptized him, in his heart of hearts, as the Walking Turd? Probably. Since his youth he had been good at making up nicknames. Many of the savage labels he stamped on people became part of their very flesh and eventually replaced their real names. That’s what had happened to Senator Henry Chirinos. No one in the Dominican Republic, except for the newspapers, called him by name; they used only his devastating epithet: the Constitutional Sot. He had the habit of stroking the greasy bristles that nested in his ears, and though the Generalissimo, obsessed with cleanliness, had forbidden him to do so in his presence, he was doing it now, and, to make matters worse, he was alternating one revolting act with another: smoothing the hairs in his nose. He was nervous, very nervous. The Benefactor knew why: he was bringing him a negative report on his enterprises. But responsibility for things going badly did not lie with Chirinos; it was the fault of the sanctions imposed by the OAS, which were strangling the country.
“If you keep picking at your nose and ears, I’ll call in the adjutants and put you behind bars,” he said in a bad temper. “I’ve forbidden you to do those disgusting things here. Are you drunk?”
The Constitutional Sot started in his chair, which faced the Benefactor’s desk. He moved his hands away from his face.
“I haven’t had a drop of alcohol,” he apologized in confusion. “You know I don’t drink during the day, Chief. Just in the evening, and at night.”
He wore a suit that the Generalissimo thought of as a monument to bad taste: grayish green, with glints of iridescence; like everything he put on, it looked as if he had squeezed his fat body into the suit with a shoehorn. Jiggling on his white shirt was a bluish tie with yellow dots, where the harsh gaze of the Benefactor detected grease spots. He thought with distaste that he had gotten the stains while eating, because Senator Chirinos ate by taking enormous mouthfuls, wolfing them down as if he feared his neighbors would snatch away his plate, and chewing with an open mouth, spraying a shower of food all around him.
“I swear there’s not a drop of alcohol in my body,” he repeated. “Just the black coffee