The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [64]
Probably it was true. When he saw him come into the office a moment ago, balancing his elephantine body and advancing very slowly, testing the floor before putting down his foot, he thought he was intoxicated. No; he must have somatized all his drinking; even when he was sober, he carried himself with the trembling uncertainty of an alcoholic.
“You’re pickled in alcohol: even when you don’t drink you look drunk,” he said, examining him from head to foot.
“It’s true,” Chirinos quickly acknowledged, making a theatrical gesture. “I am a poète maudit, Chief. Like Baudelaire and Rubén Darío.”
He had ashen skin, a double chin, thin, greasy hair, and little eyes set deep behind puffy lids. His nose, flattened since the accident, was like a boxer’s, and his almost lipless mouth added a perverse quality to his brash ugliness. He had always been so disagreeably ugly that ten years earlier, after the car crash that he miraculously survived, his friends thought plastic surgery would improve his looks. It only made them worse.
That he was still a man trusted by the Benefactor, a member of his narrow circle of intimates that included Virgilio Álvarez Pina, Paíno Pichardo, Egghead Cabral (now in disgrace), or Joaquín Balaguer, was proof that when it was time to choose his collaborators, the Generalissimo did not let himself be guided by personal likes or dislikes. In spite of the repugnance his physical appearance, slovenliness, and bad manners always inspired in the Chief, from the beginning of his regime Henry Chirinos had been favored with the delicate tasks that Trujillo entrusted to people who were not only reliable but capable. And he was one of the most capable of the men accepted into that exclusive club. An attorney who served as a constitutionalist, while still very young he had been, along with Agustín Cabral, the principal author of the Constitution ordered by Trujillo in the early days of the Era, and of all the amendments made since then. He had also composed the most important institutional and ordinary laws, and written almost all the legal decisions adopted by the Congress to legitimize the needs of the regime. There was no one like him for giving, in parliamentary speeches filled with Latin phrases and quotations that were often in French, the appearance of juridical necessity to the most arbitrary decisions of the Executive, or for refuting, with devastating logic, every proposal that Trujillo disapproved of. His mind, organized like a legal code, immediately found a technical argument to provide a veneer of legality to any decision made by Trujillo, whether it was a ruling by the Treasury or the Supreme Court, or a law passed by Congress. A good part of the legal web of the Era had been spun by the perverse skill of this great pettifogger (that’s what he had been called once, in Trujillo’s presence, by Senator Agustín Cabral, his close friend and enemy within the circle of favorites).
Because of these attributes, the perpetual parliamentarian Henry Chirinos had been everything one could be during the thirty years of the Era: deputy, senator, Minister of Justice, member of the Constitutional Tribunal, ambassador plenipotentiary and chargé d’affaires, governor of the Central Bank, president of the Trujillonian Institute, member of the Central Council of the Dominican Party, and, for the past few years, the position that required the greatest confidence, supervisor of the Benefactor’s business operations. As such, Agriculture, Commerce, and Finance were subordinate to him. Why entrust such enormous responsibility to a confirmed alcoholic? Because, in addition to being a shyster, he knew about economics. He had done well as the head of the Central Bank, and in Finance, for a few months. And because, in recent years, due to ambushes from all sides, the Benefactor needed someone in the post who was absolutely reliable and could be told about the family’s entanglements and disputes. And for that, this alcoholic greaseball was invaluable.
How did it happen that an uncontrollable drinker had not