The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [85]
“I understand that too,” Lucinda murmurs. “But not your refusing to have anything more to do with us.”
“And since you always had a good heart, I’ll bet you’re not still angry with me,” Urania says with a laugh. “Right, Lucindita?”
“Of course not,” her cousin agrees. “If you knew how much I begged my papa to send me to the United States. To be with you, at Siena Heights. I had persuaded him, I think, when the disaster came. Everybody began attacking us, telling horrible lies about the family just because my mother was the sister of a Trujillista. Nobody remembered that at the end Trujillo treated your papa like a dog. You were lucky not to be here during those months, Uranita. We were scared to death. I don’t know how Uncle Agustín stopped them from burning his house. But sometimes they threw stones at him.”
She is interrupted by a timid knock at the door.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” the nurse says, pointing at the invalid. “But it’s time.”
Urania looks at her, not understanding.
“To do his business,” Lucinda explains, glancing at the chamber pot. “He’s as regular as a clock. He’s so lucky: I have problems with my stomach and live on prunes. Nerves, they say. Well, let’s go to the living room.”
As they walk down the stairs, the memory returns to Urania of her months and years in Adrian, the austere library with stained-glass windows, beside the chapel and adjacent to the refectory, where she spent most of her time when she wasn’t in classes and seminars. Studying, reading, scrawling in notebooks, writing essays, summarizing books, in the methodical, intense, absorbed way that her teachers valued so highly and that filled some classmates with admiration and infuriated others. It wasn’t a desire to learn and succeed that kept you in the library but the yearning to become distracted, intoxicated, lost in those subjects—sciences or literature, it was all the same—so you wouldn’t think, so you could drive away your Dominican memories.
“But you’re wearing gym clothes,” Lucinda observes when they’re in the living room, near the window that faces the garden. “Don’t tell me you’ve done aerobics this morning.”
“I went for a run on the Malecón. And on my way back to the hotel, my feet brought me here, dressed in these clothes. I arrived a couple of days ago, and wasn’t sure if I’d come to see him or not. If it would be too much of a shock for him. But he hasn’t even recognized me.”
“Of course he recognized you.” Her cousin crosses her legs and takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her purse. “He can’t talk, but he knows who comes in, and he understands everything. Manolita and I see him almost every day. My mama can’t, not since she broke her hip. If we miss one day, he puts on a long face the next time.”
She sits looking at Urania in a way that makes her predict: “Another string of reproaches.” Doesn’t it make you sad that your father is spending his final years alone, in the hands of a nurse, visited only by two nieces? Isn’t it your job to be with him and give him affection? Do you think that giving him a pension means you’ve done your duty? It’s all in Lucinda’s bulging eyes. But she doesn’t dare say it. She offers Urania a cigarette, and when her cousin refuses, she exclaims:
“You don’t smoke, of course. I thought you wouldn’t, living in the United States. They’re psychotic about tobacco up there.”
“Yes, really psychotic,” Urania admits. “They’ve banned smoking in the office. It doesn’t matter to me, I never smoked.”
“The perfect girl,” Lucindita says with a laugh. “Listen, darling, you can tell me, did you ever have any vices? Did you ever do any of those crazy things everybody else does?”
“Some.” Urania laughs. “But I can’t tell you about them.”
As she talks to her cousin, she examines the living room. The furniture is the same, its shabbiness shows that; the armchair has a broken leg and a wedge of wood props it up; the frayed upholstery is torn and has lost its color, which, Urania recalls, was