The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [96]
“How many did you kill personally?” the Generalissimo joked, and another wave of laughter ran around the table, making the chairs creak and the crystal sing.
“What you said about idle gossip is the absolute truth, Excellency,” the rotund officer said with a start, and his smile turned into a grimace. “Now they blame everything on us. False, all false. The Army obeyed orders. We began to separate the illegals from the others. But the people wouldn’t let us. Everybody began to hunt down Haitians. Campesinos, merchants, and officials revealed their hiding places, and they hung them and beat them to death. They burned them, sometimes. In many places, the Army had to intervene to stop the excesses. There was a lot of resentment against them for their thieving and plundering.”
“President Balaguer, you were one of the negotiators with Haiti following those events,” said Trujillo, continuing his survey. “How many were there?”
The small, gray figure of the President of the Republic, half swallowed up by his chair, stretched his benign head forward. After observing the gathering from behind his nearsighted man’s glasses, the soft, well-modulated voice emerged, the one that recited poems at poetry competitions, celebrated the crowning of Miss Dominican Republic (he was always the Royal Poet), made speeches to the crowds on Trujillo’s political tours, or expounded on the government’s policies in the National Assembly.
“The exact figure could never be determined, Excellency.” He spoke slowly, with a professorial air. “A prudent estimate is between ten and fifteen thousand. In our negotiations with the Haitian government, we agreed on a symbolic figure: 2,750. In this way, each affected family would, in theory, receive a hundred pesos of the 275,000 in cash paid by Your Excellency’s government as a gesture of goodwill and for the sake of Haitian-Dominican harmony. But, as you will remember, that is not what happened.”
He fell silent, a hint of a smile on his round little face narrowing the small, pale eyes behind his thick glasses.
“Why didn’t the compensation reach the families?” asked Simon Gittleman.
“Because the President of Haiti, Sténio Vincent, was a thief and kept the money.” Trujillo laughed. “Only 275,000? As I recall, we agreed on 750,000 to make them stop protesting.”
“That is true, Excellency,” Dr. Balaguer replied immediately, with the same calm, perfect diction, “750,000 pesos were agreed on, but only 275,000 in cash. The remaining half million was to be remitted in annual payments of 100,000 pesos over a period of five years. However, and I remember this quite clearly, I was interim Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and I and Don Anselmo Paulino, who advised me during the negotiations, imposed a clause according to which the payments were contingent upon the presentation, before an international tribunal, of the death certificates issued for the 2,750 recognized victims during the first two weeks of October 1937. Haiti never fulfilled this requirement. And consequently the Dominican Republic was exempted from paying the remaining sum. Reparations never went beyond the initial remittance. Your Excellency made the payment out of your own patrimony, so that it did not cost the Dominican state a cent.”
“A small amount to end a problem that might have wiped us out,” concluded Trujillo, who was serious now. “It’s true, some innocent people died. But we Dominicans recovered our sovereignty. Since then our relations with Haiti have been excellent, thank God.”
He wiped his lips and took a sip of water. They had begun to serve coffee and to offer liqueurs. He did not drink coffee, and never drank alcohol at lunch, except in San Cristóbal, on the Fundación Ranch or in Mahogany House, in the company of intimates. Along with the images his memory brought back of those bloody weeks in October 1937, when his office received reports of the horrifying dimensions the