The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [84]
Urania bursts out laughing. Not so much because of what her cousin says as for the way she says it: with eloquence and humor, talking with her mouth, eyes, hands, her whole body, all at the same time and with the effusive high spirits typical of Dominican speech. Something she learned about, by way of contrast, thirty-five years earlier, when she came to Adrian, Michigan, and suddenly found herself surrounded by people who spoke only English.
“When you left and didn’t even say goodbye to me, I was so sad I almost died,” her cousin says, sorrowful about those long-ago times. “Nobody in the family understood anything. But what does this mean? Uranita goes to the United States and doesn’t even say goodbye! We pestered Uncle Agustín with questions, but he seemed to be in the dark too. ‘The nuns offered her a scholarship, it was too good an opportunity to miss.’ Nobody believed him.”
“That’s how it was, Lucindita.” Urania looks at her father, who once again is motionless and attentive, listening to them. “There was a chance to study in Michigan, and not being a fool, I took it.”
“That part I understand,” her cousin reiterates, “and I know you deserved a scholarship. But why leave as if you were running away? Why break with your family, your father, your country?”
“I was always a little crazy, Lucindita. And really, even though I didn’t write, I thought about all of you a lot. Especially you.”
A lie. You didn’t miss anyone, not even Lucinda, your cousin and classmate, your confidante and accomplice in mischief. You wanted to forget her too, and Manolita, Aunt Adelina, and your father, this city and this country, during those early months in faraway Adrian, on that beautiful campus of neat gardens with their begonias, tulips, magnolia trees, borders of rosebushes, and tall pines whose resinous scent drifted into the room you shared during your first year with four roommates, among them Alina, the black girl from Georgia, your first friend in that new world so different from the one where you had spent your first fourteen years. Did the Dominican nuns at Adrian know why you had left as if you were “running away”? Did they find out from Sister Mary, the director of studies at Santo Domingo? They had to know. If Sister Mary hadn’t given them some background, they wouldn’t have given you the scholarship so quickly. The sisters were models of discretion, because in the two years Urania spent at Siena Heights Prep and the four years following at Siena Heights College, none of them ever made the slightest allusion to the story that tore at your memory. As for the rest, they never repented of having been so generous: you were the first graduate of that school to be accepted at Harvard and earn a degree with honors from the most prestigious university in the world. Adrian, Michigan! You haven’t been back in so many years. It must have changed from the provincial town of farmers who went into their houses at sunset and left the streets empty, families whose horizons ended at neighboring towns that seemed like twins—Clinton and Chelsea—and whose greatest diversion was attending the famous barbecued chicken festival in Manchester. A clean city, Adrian, and pretty, especially in winter when the snow hid the straight, narrow streets where people could ice-skate and ski, under white puffs of cotton that children made into snowmen and that you, entranced, watched falling from the sky, and where you would have died of bitterness, and perhaps of boredom, if you hadn’t devoted yourself so furiously to studying.
Her cousin has not stopped talking.
“And a little while after that they killed Trujillo, and the calamities began. Do you know the caliés went into the academy? They beat the sisters, Sister Helen Claire’s face was covered with cuts and bruises, and they killed Badulaque, the German shepherd. They almost burned down our house because we were related to your papa. They said that Uncle Agustín sent you to the United States because he guessed what was going to happen.”
“Well, he wanted to get me away from here,” Urania interrupts.