The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [77]
On some pretext or other he sent his wife, Guarina, and his daughter, Leslie, who knew nothing of his activities, to the farm of some relatives in La Romana, and with a glass of rum in his hand, he sat down to wait. He had a loaded revolver, with the safety off, in his pocket. But the caliés did not come that day, or the next, or the one after that, to his house, or to his office at Ready-Mix, where he continued to show up punctually with all the sangfroid he could muster. Luis and Iván had not betrayed him, and neither had the people he knew in the clandestine groups. Miraculously, he escaped a repression that struck at the guilty and the innocent, filled the prisons, and for the first time in the twenty-nine years of the regime, terrorized the families of the middle class, Trujillo’s traditional mainstays and the source of most of the prisoners, members of what was called, in response to the frustrated invasion, the June 14 Movement. Tony’s cousin Ramón (Moncho) Imbert Rainieri was one of its leaders.
Why did he escape? Because of the courage of Luis and Iván, no doubt—two years later they were still in the dungeons of La Victoria—and the courage, no doubt, of other girls and boys in June 14 who forgot to name him. Perhaps they considered him merely an onlooker, not an activist. Tony Imbert was so shy that he rarely opened his mouth at the meetings Moncho took him to for the first time; he would only listen, or offer a monosyllabic opinion. And it was unlikely he was in the files of the SIM except as the brother of Major Segundo Imbert. His service record was clean. He had spent his life working for the regime—as an inspector general on the railroad, governor of Puerto Plata, general supervisor of the National Lottery, director of the office that issued identity papers—and as manager at Ready-Mix, a factory that belonged to Trujillo’s son-in-law. Why would they suspect him?
Very cautiously, in the days following June 14, he stayed at the factory at night, dismantled the sticks of dynamite and returned them to the quarries, while he pondered how and with whom he would carry out the next plan to do away with Trujillo. He confessed everything that had happened (and failed to happen) to his dearest friend, Salvador (Turk) Estrella Sadhalá, who berated Tony for not including him in the Máximo Gómez plot. Salvador had reached the same conclusion on his own: nothing would change as long as Trujillo was alive. They began to propose and discard possible methods of attack, but said nothing in front of Amadito, the third man in their trio: it was hard to believe that a military adjutant would want to kill the Benefactor.
Not long afterward, the traumatic episode in Amadito’s career occurred—in order to obtain his promotion, he had to kill a prisoner (his ex-fiancée’s brother, he believed)—that brought him into the game. It would soon be two years since the landings at Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo. One year, eleven months, and fourteen days, to be exact. Antonio Imbert looked at his watch. He probably wasn’t coming.
So many things had happened in the Dominican Republic, in the world, and in his personal life. So many. The massive dragnets of January 1960, into which so many boys and girls of the June 14 Movement fell, among them the Mirabal sisters and their husbands. Trujillo’s break with his old accomplice, the Catholic Church, after the Pastoral Letter of January 1960, in which the bishops denounced the dictatorship. The attempt against President Betancourt of Venezuela, in June 1960, that mobilized so many countries against Trujillo, including his great ally the United States, which voted in favor of sanctions on August 6, 1960, at the conference in Costa Rica. And,