The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [73]
“Yes, hello? Is that you, Excellency?”
“Come to the Avenida this afternoon,” he said, very curtly, by way of greeting.
“Of course, Chief.” General Román sounded alarmed. “Would you prefer me to come right now to the Palace? Has something happened?”
“You’ll find out what’s happened,” he said, slowly, imagining the nervousness of his niece Mireya’s husband, on hearing how dryly he spoke to him. “Any news?”
“Everything normal, Excellency,” General Román said hurriedly. “I was receiving the routine regional reports. But if you prefer…”
“On the Avenida,” he cut him off. And hung up.
It cheered him to imagine the sizzling questions, suppositions, fears, suspicions he had put into the head of that asshole who was the Minister of the Armed Forces. What did they say about me to the Chief? What gossip, what slander have my enemies told him? Have I fallen into disgrace? Did I fail to carry out one of his orders? He would be in hell until the evening.
But this thought occupied him for only a few seconds, and once again the humiliating memory of the girl filled his mind. Anger, sadness, nostalgia mixed together in his spirit and kept him in a state of turmoil. And then it occurred to him: “A cure equal to the disease.” The face of a beautiful woman, exploding with pleasure in his arms, thanking him for the joy he had given her. Wouldn’t that erase the frightened little face of that idiot? Yes: he’d go tonight to San Cristóbal, to Mahogany House, and wipe away the affront in the same bed and with the same weapons. This decision—he touched his fly in a kind of exorcism—raised his spirits and stiffened his resolve to continue with the day’s schedule.
9
“What’s new with Segundo?” asked Antonio de la Maza.
Leaning against the steering wheel, Antonio Imbert replied, not turning around:
“I saw him yesterday. They let me visit him every week now. A short visit, half an hour. Sometimes the fucking warden of La Victoria decides to cut the visits to fifteen minutes. Just to be a son of a bitch.”
“How is he?”
How could someone be who, trusting in a promise of amnesty, left Puerto Rico, where he had a good job working for the Ferré family in Ponce, and returned to his country only to discover that they were waiting to try him for the alleged crime of a unionist that had been committed in Puerto Plata years earlier, and sentence him to thirty years in prison? How could a man feel who, if he had killed, did it for the regime, and was repaid by Trujillo’s leaving him to rot in a dungeon for the past five years?
But this was not his answer, because Imbert knew that Antonio de la Maza had not asked the question out of interest in his brother Segundo but only to break the interminable waiting. He shrugged:
“Segundo has balls. If he’s having a tough time he doesn’t show it. Sometimes he even gets a kick out of cheering me up.”
“You didn’t tell him anything about this.”
“Of course not. To be on the safe side, and not to give him false hopes. Suppose it fails?”
“It won’t fail,” Lieutenant García Guerrero interjected from the back seat. “The Goat is coming.”
Was he? Tony Imbert looked at his watch. He still might come, no reason to lose hope. He never lost patience, and hadn’t for many years. When he was young he did, unfortunately, and that led him to do things he regretted with every cell in his body. Like the telegram he sent in 1949, crazed with anger at the landing of anti-Trujillistas, led by Horacio Julio Ornes, on the beach at Luperón in the province of Puerto Plata, when he was governor. “Give the order and I’ll burn Puerto Plata, Chief.” The words he regretted most in his life. He saw them printed in every newspaper, for the Generalissimo wanted all Dominicans to know how much of a dedicated, fanatical Trujillista the young governor was.
Why did Horacio Julio Ornes, Félix Córdoba Boniche, Tulio Hostilio Arvelo, Gugú Henríquez, Miguelucho Feliú, Salvador Reyes Valdéz, Federico Horacio, and the rest choose Puerto Plata on that long-ago June 19 in 1949? The expedition was