The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [9]
He found his jockstrap, shorts, and undershirt, immaculately washed and ironed, along with his exercise shoes. He dressed with great effort. He never had needed much sleep: when he was a young man in San Cristóbal, when he was the head of the rural guards on the Boca Chica sugar plantation, four or five hours had been enough, even if he had been drinking and fucking till dawn. His ability to recover physically with a minimum of sleep contributed to his aura of superiority. Not anymore. He woke exhausted and couldn’t sleep for even four hours; two or three at the most, and those plagued by nightmares.
The night before, he lay sleepless, in the dark. Through the window he could see the tops of trees and a piece of sky studded with stars. From time to time, in the clear night, he heard the chatter of those old biddies, night owls declaiming poems by Juan de Dios Peza, Amado Nervo, Rubén Darío (which made him suspect that among them was the Walking Turd, who knew Darío by heart), Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Poems of Love, and the risqué stanzas of Juan Antonio Alix. And, of course, the verses of Doña María, the Dominican writer and moralist. He laughed aloud as he climbed on the stationary bike and began to pedal. His wife had ended up taking herself seriously, and periodically would organize literary evenings in the skating rink at Radhamés Manor and bring in actresses to recite dumb-ass poems. Senator Henry Chirinos, who passed himself off as a poet, would participate in these soirees, feeding his cirrhosis at public expense. To ingratiate themselves with María Martínez, those bitches, just like Chirinos himself, had memorized entire pages of her Moral Meditations or speeches from her theater piece, False Amity. They recited them, and then the biddies applauded. And his wife—for that fat, stupid old woman, the Bountiful First Lady, was his wife—had taken the business about being a writer and moralist seriously. And why not? Didn’t the newspapers, the radio, the television say so? Wasn’t Moral Meditations, with a prologue by the Mexican José Vasconcelos, required reading in the schools, and wasn’t it reprinted every two months? Hadn’t False Amity been the greatest stage hit in the thirty-one years of the Trujillo Era? Hadn’t the critics and reporters, the university professors, priests, and intellectuals, praised her to the skies? Didn’t they devote a seminar to her at the Trujillonian Institute? Hadn’t her concepts been acclaimed by the bishops, those traitorous crows, those Judases, who after living out of his wallet were talking now, just like the Yankees, about human rights? The Bountiful First Lady was a writer and a moralist. No thanks to her, but to him, like everything else that had happened in this country for the past three decades. Trujillo could turn water into wine and multiply loaves of bread if he fucking well felt like it. He reminded María of this during their last argument: “You forget you didn’t write that shit, you can’t even write your name without making grammatical mistakes, it was that Galician traitor José Almoina, paid by me. Don’t you know what people say? That the first letters of False Amity, F and A, stand for Find Almoina.” He laughed again, open, joyful laughter. His bitterness had vanished. María burst into tears—“How you humiliate me!”—and threatened to complain to Mama Julia. As if his poor ninety-six-year-old mother was in any shape