The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [89]
“Maybe to my parents, but not to me or Manolita, we were very young. It hurt Uncle Agustín that they thought he could have betrayed Trujillo. For years he protested the injustice that had been done to him.”
“The Generalissimo’s most loyal servant,” mocks Urania. “For a man capable of committing monstrous crimes for Trujillo to be suspected of complicity with his assassins—that really was an injustice!”
She stops because of the reproach she sees on her cousin’s round face.
“I don’t know why you talk about monstrous crimes,” she murmurs in astonishment. “Maybe my uncle was wrong to be a Trujillista. Now they say he was a dictator and all. Your father served him in good faith. Even though he held such high posts, he didn’t take advantage of them. Did he? He’s spending his final years as poor as a dog; without you, he’d be in an old-age home.”
Lucinda tries to control the irritation that has overwhelmed her. She takes a final drag on her cigarette, and since she has no place to put it out—there are no ashtrays in the dilapidated living room—she tosses it out the window into the withered garden.
“I know very well that my papa didn’t serve Trujillo out of self-interest.” Urania cannot avoid a trace of sarcasm. “That doesn’t seem extenuating to me. It’s more like an aggravating circumstance.”
Her cousin looks at her, uncomprehending.
“The fact that he did what he did out of admiration, out of love for him,” Urania explains. “Of course he must have been offended when Ramfis, Abbes García, and the rest suspected him. He almost went mad with despair when Trujillo turned his back on him.”
“Well, maybe he was wrong,” her cousin repeats, her eyes begging her to change the subject. “At least recognize that he was a very decent man. He didn’t make accommodations, like so many others, who went on living the good life with every government, especially the three run by Balaguer.”
“I wish he had served Trujillo out of self-interest, to steal or have power,” Urania says, and again she sees perplexity and displeasure in Lucinda’s eyes. “Anything, rather than seeing him whimper because Trujillo wouldn’t grant him an audience, because letters appeared in ‘The Public Forum’ insulting him.”
It is a persistent memory, one that tormented her in Adrian and in Cambridge, in somewhat attenuated form stayed with her through all her years at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and that still assaults her in Manhattan: the helpless Senator Agustín Cabral pacing frantically in this very living room, asking himself what intrigue had been mounted against him by the Constitutional Sot, the unctuous Joaquín Balaguer, the cynical Virgilio Álvarez Pina, or Paíno Pichardo, to make the Generalissimo wipe out his existence overnight. Because what existence could a senator and ex-minister have when the Benefactor did not answer his letters or permit him to appear in Congress? Was the history of Anselmo Paulino repeating itself in him? Would the caliés come for him in the middle of the night and bury him in some dungeon? Would La Nación and El Caribe come out with vile reports of his thefts, embezzlements, betrayals, crimes?
“Falling into disgrace was worse for him than if they had killed the person he loved best.”
Her cousin listens to her with increasing discomfort.
“Was that why you got so angry, Uranita?” she says at last. “Over politics? But I remember very clearly that you had no interest at all in politics. When those two girls nobody knew came in at midyear, for example. Everybody said they were caliesas and nobody talked about anything else, but you were bored by political gossip and told us all to shut up.”
“I’ve never been interested in politics,” Urania agrees. “You’re right, why talk about things that happened thirty years ago?”
The nurse appears on the stairs. She comes down drying her hands on a blue cloth.
“All cleaned up and powdered like a baby,” she announces. “You can go up whenever you want. I’m going to prepare Don Agustín’s lunch. Can I fix something for you too, señora?”
“No, thank you,” says Urania.