The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [8]
“I owe everything I am to discipline,” he thought. And discipline, the polestar of his life, he owed to the Marines. He closed his eyes. The entrance tests at San Pedro de Macorís for the Dominican National Police, a force the Yankees decided to create in the third year of the occupation, were very hard. He passed with no difficulty. During training, half of the candidates were eliminated. He relished every exercise demanding agility, boldness, audacity, or stamina, even the brutal ones that tested your will, your obedience to a superior, plunging into mudholes with a full field pack or surviving in the wild, drinking your own urine and chewing on stalks, weeds, grasshoppers. Sergeant Gittleman gave him the highest rating: “You’ll go far, Trujillo.” And he had, thanks to the merciless discipline of heroes and mystics taught to him by the Marines. He thought with gratitude of Sergeant Simon Gittleman. A loyal, disinterested gringo in a country of hagglers, bloodsuckers, and assholes. Had the United States had a more sincere friend than Trujillo in the past thirty-one years? What government had given them greater support in the UN? Which was the first to declare war on Germany and Japan? Who gave the biggest bribes to representatives, senators, governors, mayors, lawyers, and reporters in the United States? His reward: economic sanctions by the OAS to make that nigger Rómulo Betancourt happy, to keep sucking at the tit of Venezuelan oil. If Johnny Abbes had handled things better and the bomb had blown off the head of that faggot Rómulo, there wouldn’t be any sanctions and the asshole gringos wouldn’t be handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. But then he wouldn’t have discovered that in a country of two hundred million assholes, he had a friend like Simon Gittleman. Capable of initiating a personal campaign in defense of the Dominican Republic from Phoenix, Arizona, where he had been in business since his retirement from the Marines. And not asking for a cent! There still were men like that in the Marines. Not asking, not charging for anything! What a lesson for those leeches in the Senate and the House of Representatives he’d been feeding for years; they always wanted more checks, more concessions, more decrees, more tax exemptions, and now, when he needed them, they pretended they didn’t know him.
He looked at the clock: four minutes to go. A magnificent gringo, that Simon Gittleman! A real Marine. Indignant at the offensive against Trujillo by the White House, Venezuela, and the OAS, he gave up his business in Arizona and bombarded the American press with letters, reminding everyone that during all of the Trujillo Era the Dominican Republic had been a bulwark of anti-Communism, the best ally of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Not satisfied with that, he funded—out of his own damn pocket!—support committees, paid for publications, organized conferences. And to set an example, he came to Ciudad Trujillo with his family and rented a house on the Malecón. This afternoon Simon and Dorothy would have lunch with him in the Palace, and the ex-Marine would receive the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, the highest decoration the Dominican Republic could bestow. A real Marine, yes sir!
Four sharp, now it was time. He turned on the lamp on the night table, put on his slippers, and got up, without the old agility. His bones ached and he felt pains in his leg and back muscles, the way he had a few days ago at Mahogany House, on that damn night with that anemic little bitch. He ground his teeth in annoyance. He was walking