The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [87]
“Manolita had terrible luck in her marriage too. Not because her husband was a womanizer, like mine. Esteban wouldn’t harm a fly. But he’s useless, he loses every job he gets. Now he’s working at one of the tourist hotels they built in Punta Canas. He earns a miserable salary, and my sister sees him maybe once or twice a month. Is that what you call a marriage?”
“Do you remember Rosalía Perdomo?” Urania interrupts.
“Rosalía Perdomo?” Lucinda searches her memory, half closing her eyes. “The truth is, I don’t…Oh, sure! The Rosalía who had that trouble with Ramfis Trujillo? Nobody ever saw her again. They must have sent her overseas.”
Urania’s admission to Harvard Law School was celebrated at Siena Heights as a great event. Until she had been accepted, she hadn’t realized how much prestige the university had in the United States, how reverently everyone referred to those who had graduated, studied, or taught there. It happened in the most natural way; if she had planned it, it couldn’t have been easier. She was in her last year. The guidance counselor, after congratulating her on her academic work; asked what professional plans she had, and Urania replied, “I like the law.” “A career where you can earn a lot of money,” Dr. Dorothy Sallison responded. But Urania had said “law” because it was the first thing that came to mind, she could have just as easily said medicine, economics, or biology. You had never thought about your future, Urania; you were so paralyzed by the past it never occurred to you to think about what lay ahead. Dr. Sallison reviewed various options with her and they chose four prestigious universities: Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, and Stanford. One or two days after completing the applications, Dr. Sallison called her: “Why not Harvard too? You have nothing to lose.” Urania remembers traveling to interviews, the nights in religious hostels, arranged for by the Dominican sisters. And the joy of Dr. Sallison, the nuns, and her classmates as she received acceptances from all the universities, including Harvard. They gave her a party, where she was obliged to dance.
Her six years in Adrian allowed her to survive, something she thought she would never be able to do. Which is why she was still profoundly grateful to the Dominican sisters. And yet Adrian, in her memory, was a somnambulistic, uncertain time, the only concrete thing the infinite hours in the library, when she worked to keep from thinking.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was different. There she began to live again, to discover that life was worth living, that studying was not only therapy but a joy, the most glorious of diversions. How she had relished the classes, the lectures, the seminars! Overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities (in addition to studying law, she audited a course in Latin American history, a seminar on the Caribbean, a series on Dominican social history), she found there were not enough hours in the day or weeks in the month to do everything that appealed to her.
Years of intensive work, and not only intellectual. In her second year at Harvard, her father let her know, in one of those letters she never answered, that in view of how badly things were going, he found himself obliged to cut the five hundred dollars a month he was sending her down to two hundred. She obtained a student loan, and her studies were assured. But to meet her frugal needs, in her free hours she worked as a cashier at a supermarket, a waitress at a Boston pizzeria, a clerk at a pharmacy, and—her least tedious job—as a companion and reader to a paraplegic millionaire of Polish origin, Mr. Melvin Makovsky, to whom, from five to eight in the evening, in his Victorian brownstone house on Massachusetts Avenue, she read voluminous eighteenth- and