The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [90]
“Well, tonight you’ll come to the house for supper. You’ll give my mama such a nice surprise. I’ll call Manolita too, she’ll be so happy.” Lucinda puts on a mournful face. “You’ll be shocked, Uranita. Do you remember how big and pretty the house was? Only half of it is left. When Papa died, we had to sell the garden along with the garage and the servants’ quarters. Well, enough of that. Seeing you has made me remember my childhood. We were happy then, weren’t we? It never occurred to us that everything would change, that lean years would come. Well, I’m going, Mama hasn’t had her lunch yet. You’ll come for supper, won’t you? You won’t disappear for another thirty-five years? You must remember the house, on Calle Santiago, about five blocks from here.”
“I remember it very well.” Urania stands and embraces her cousin. “This neighborhood hasn’t changed at all.”
She accompanies Lucinda to the front door and says goodbye with another hug and a kiss on the cheek. When she sees her walking away in her flowered dress, along a street boiling in the sun, where the response to frantic barking is the cackling of hens, she is filled with anguish. What are you doing here? What have you come to find in Santo Domingo, in this house? Will you go to have supper with Lucinda, Manolita, and Aunt Adelina? The poor thing must be a fossil, just like your father.
She climbs the stairs, slowly, putting off seeing him again. She is relieved to find him asleep, huddled in his chair; his eyes are wrinkled, his mouth open, and his rachitic chest rises and falls in a rhythmic pattern. “Just a piece of a man.” She sits on the bed and contemplates him. Studies him, reads him. They imprisoned him too, when Trujillo died. Believing he was one of the Trujillistas who conspired with Antonio de la Maza, General Juan Tomás Díaz and his brother Modesto, Antonio Imbert, and company. How frightening and how frightful for you, Papa. She had learned many years later, in a passing reference in an article about the events of 1961 in the Dominican Republic, that her father had also been caught in the dragnet. But she never knew the details. As far as she could remember, Senator Cabral did not allude to the experience in the letters she never answered. “That anyone could imagine, even for a second, that you planned to assassinate Trujillo, must have hurt you as much as falling into disgrace without knowing why.” Did Johnny Abbes himself interrogate him? Ramfis? Pechito León Estévez? Did they sit him on the Throne? Was her father linked in some way to the conspirators? True, he had made superhuman efforts to regain Trujillo’s favor, but what did that prove? Many conspirators kissed Trujillo’s ass until moments before they killed him. It very well might be that Agustín Cabral, a good friend of Modesto Díaz, had been informed of the plan. Even Balaguer knew about it, according to some. If the President of the Republic and the Minister of the Armed Forces had heard about it, why not her father? The conspirators knew that the Chief had ordered the fall from grace of Senator Cabral several weeks earlier; nothing strange about their thinking of him as a possible ally.
From time to time her father emits a quiet snore. When a fly settles on his face, he drives it away, not waking, with a movement of his head. How did you find out they had killed him? On May 30, 1961, you were already in Adrian. She was beginning to shake off the heaviness, the exhaustion that kept her disengaged from the world and from herself, in a kind of somnambulism, when the sister in charge of the dormitory came to the room that Urania shared with four other girls and showed her the headline in the newspaper she held in her hand: TRUJILLO KILLED. “I’ll lend it to you,” she said. What did you feel? She would swear she felt nothing, that the news slid over her without piercing her consciousness, like everything else she heard and saw around her. It’s possible you didn’t even read the article, didn’t look past the headline. She recalls, however, that