The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [79]
By then, she was already a legend in the small world of the clandestine struggle against Trujillo. Which of the things they said about her were true, which were exaggerated, which invented? No one would have presumed to ask her, no one wanted to receive that deep, scornful look or one of those cutting replies with which she sometimes silenced an opponent. They said that as a teenager she dared to rebuff Trujillo himself by refusing to dance with him, and for that reason her father was deposed as mayor of Ojo de Agua and sent to prison. Others suggested that it was more than a rebuff, that she had slapped him because while they were dancing he fondled her and said something obscene, a possibility that many rejected (“She wouldn’t be alive, he would have killed her or had her killed on the spot”), but not Antonio Imbert. From the first time he saw and heard her, he did not doubt for a second that if the slap wasn’t the truth, it could have been. It was enough to see and hear Minerva Mirabal for only a few minutes (talking, for example, with icy naturalness about the need to prepare activists psychologically to resist torture) to know she was capable of slapping even Trujillo if he showed a lack of respect. She had been arrested several times, and stories were told about her fearlessness, first in La Cuarenta, and then in La Victoria, where she went on a hunger strike, withstood solitary confinement on bread and worm-infested water, and where, they said, she was savagely mistreated. She never spoke of her time in prison, or about the torture, or about the calvary her family had lived since it was known she was an anti-Trujillista: they had been hounded, had their few goods confiscated, and been placed under house arrest. The dictatorship allowed Minerva to study the law so that when she finished—a well-planned vengeance—it could deny her a professional license—that is, condemn her to not working, to not earning a living, to feeling frustrated in the prime of her youth, having studied five years for nothing. But none of that made her bitter; she went on tirelessly, encouraging everyone, an engine that would not stop, a prelude—Imbert often told himself—to the young, beautiful, enthusiastic, idealistic country the Dominican Republic would be one day.
He was embarrassed as he felt his eyes filling with tears. He lit a cigarette and took several drags, blowing the smoke toward the ocean, where moonlight glimmered and played. There was no breeze now. Occasionally, the headlights of a car appeared in the distance, coming from Ciudad Trujillo. The four would sit up straight, crane their necks, tensely scrutinize the darkness, but each time, when the car was twenty or thirty meters away, they discovered it wasn’t the Chevrolet and slumped back in their seats, disappointed.
The one who controlled his emotions best was Imbert. He had always been quiet, but in recent years, since the idea of killing Trujillo had taken possession of him and, like a hermit crab, fed on all his energy, his silence had intensified. He had never had many friends; in the last few months, his life had been bounded by his office at Ready-Mix, his home, and his daily meetings with Estrella Sadhal