Antonio de la Maza had never been a heartfelt Trujillista. Not as a military adjutant, and not later, when after asking for the Chief’s permission to leave the military, he worked for him in civilian life, managing the Trujillo family’s sawmills in Restauración. He clenched his teeth in disgust: he had never been able to stop working for him. As a soldier or as a civilian, for more than twenty years he had contributed to the fortune and power of the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation. It was the great failure in his life. He never knew how to free himself from the snares Trujillo set for him. Hating him with all his might, he had continued to serve him, even after Tavito’s death. That was the reason for Turk’s insult: “I wouldn’t sell my brother for a couple of bucks.” He hadn’t sold Tavito. He had dissembled and swallowed his rancor. What else could he do? Let himself be killed by Johnny Abbes’s caliés so he could die with a clear conscience? It wasn’t a clear conscience that Antonio wanted. He wanted revenge for himself and for Tavito. And to get it he had swallowed all the shit in the world during these past four years, even having to hear one of his closest friends say what a good many people, he was sure, repeated behind his back.
He hadn’t sold Tavito. His younger brother had been a dear friend. Unlike Antonio, the ingenuous, boyishly innocent Tavito had been a convinced Trujillista, one of those who thought of the Chief as a superior being. They often argued about it, because it irritated Antonio when his younger brother repeated, like a refrain, that Trujillo was heaven’s gift to the Republic. Well, it was true, the Generalissimo had done favors for Tavito. Thanks to his orders Tavito had been accepted into the Air Force and learned to fly—his dream since childhood—and then was hired as a pilot for Dominican Airlines, which allowed him to make frequent trips to Miami, something his younger brother loved because he could fuck blondes there. Before that, Tavito had been in London, as military attaché, and in a drunken argument had shot and killed Luis Bernardino, the Dominican consul. Trujillo saved him from prison by claiming he had diplomatic immunity and ordered the court in Ciudad Trujillo, where he was tried, to absolve him. Yes, Tavito had his reasons for feeling grateful to Trujillo and, as he told Antonio, for being “ready to give my life for the Chief and do anything he orders me to.” A prophetic statement, damn it.
“Yes, you gave your life for him,” Antonio thought as he smoked his cigarette. The affair in which Tavito became embroiled in 1956 had smelled bad to him from the start. His brother came to tell him about it, because Tavito told him everything. Even this, which had the air of one of those murky operations that had filled Dominican history since Trujillo’s rise to power. But Tavito, the dumb shit, instead of feeling uneasy, covering his ears, being alarmed at the mission he had been entrusted with—picking up a drugged and masked individual in Montecristi, who was taken off a plane that had come from the United States, and flying him in a small, unregistered Cessna to the Fundación Ranch in San Cristóbal—was delighted, taking it as a sign that the Generalissimo trusted him. Not even when the press in the United States expressed outrage, and the White House began to pressure the Dominican government to facilitate the investigation into the abduction, in New York, of Professor Jesús de Galíndez, a Spanish Basque, did Tavito show the slightest concern.
“This Galíndez business looks very serious,” Antonio warned him. “That’s the guy you took from Montecristi to Trujillo’s ranch, who else could it be. They kidnapped him in New York and brought him here. Keep your mouth shut. Forget all about it. You’re risking your life, Tavito.”
Now Antonio de la Maza had a good idea of what happened to Jesús de Galíndez, one of the Spanish Republicans to whom Trujillo, in the kind of contradictory political operation that was his specialty, gave asylum in the Dominican Republic at the end of the Civil War. Antonio hadn’t met this professor, but many of his friends had, and from them he learned that he had worked for the government in the State Department of Labor and at the School of Diplomacy, attached to Foreign Relations. In 1946 he left Ciudad Trujillo and settled in New York, where he began to help Dominican exiles and write against the Trujillo regime, which he knew from the inside.
In March 1956, Jesús de Galíndez, who had become an American citizen, disappeared after being seen, for the last time, coming out of a subway station on Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan. A few weeks earlier, publication had been announced of his book on Trujillo; he had submitted it as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, where he was already teaching. The disappearance of an obscure Spanish exile, in a city and a country where so many people disappeared, would have passed unnoticed, and no one would have paid attention to the outcry from Dominican exiles, if Galíndez had not been an American citizen and, above all, if he had not worked for the CIA, a fact that was revealed when the scandal broke. The powerful machinery that Trujillo had in the United States—journalists, congressmen, lobbyists, lawyers, and promoters—could not contain the explosion of indignation in the press, beginning with The New York Times, and among many representatives in Congress, at the possibility that a tinhorn Caribbean dictator would dare to abduct and murder an American citizen on American soil.
In the weeks and months that followed the disappearance of Galíndez, whose body was never found, the investigation by the press and the FBI unequivocally proved the regime’s complete responsibility. A short while before it happened, General Espaillat, Razor, had been named Dominican consul in New York. The FBI identified compromising inquiries regarding Galíndez by Minerva Bernardino, the Dominican ambassador to the UN and a woman close to Trujillo. Even more serious was the FBI’s identification of a small plane with a false registration, flown by a pilot without a proper license, that took off illegally on the night of the kidnapping from a small airport on Long Island, heading for Florida. The pilot was named Murphy, and from that time on he lived in the Dominican Republic, working for Dominican Airlines. Murphy and Tavito flew together and had become good friends.
Antonio learned all this in bits and pieces (censorship did not allow the Dominican press and radio to mention the subject) in broadcasts from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or the Voice of America, which could be picked up on shortwave, or in copies of the Miami Herald or The New York Times that filtered into the country in the bags and uniforms of pilots and airline attendants.
Seven months after the disappearance of Galíndez, Murphy’s name suddenly appeared in the international press as the pilot of the plane that had taken an anesthetized Galíndez out of the United States and brought him to the Dominican Republic, and Antonio, who had met Murphy through Tavito—the three of them had shared a paella washed down with wine from La Rioja in the Casa de España on Calle de Padre Billini—jumped into his van in Tirolí, near the Haitian border, and with the accelerator down to the floor and his brain about to burst with grim conjectures, drove to Ciudad Trujillo. He found Tavito in his house, calmly playing bridge with his wife, Altagracia. In order not to worry his sister-in-law, Antonio took him to a noisy club, Típico Najayo, where the music of the Ramón Gallardo Combo and its singer Rafael Martínez allowed for conversation that could not be overheard by the wrong ears. After ordering kid stew and two bottles of Presidente beer, and with no further preamble, Antonio advised Tavito to request asylum at an embassy. His younger brother, burst into laughter: what bullshit. He didn’t even know that Murphy’s name was in every American newspaper. He wasn’t worried. His confidence in Trujillo was as prodigious as his naiveté.
“I’ll have to tell that gringo all about it,” a horrified Antonio heard him say. “He’s selling his things, he’s decided to go back to the States to get married. He’s engaged to a girl in Oregon. If he goes there now it would be like putting his head in the lion’s mouth. Nothing will happen to him here. The Chief rules here, Antonio.”
Antonio did not allow him to joke. Without raising his voice or attracting the attention of nearby tables, with muted fury at so much innocence, he tried to make him understand:
“Don’t you get it, asshole?
This is serious. The Galíndez kidnapping has put Trujillo in a very delicate situation with the Yankees. Everybody involved in the kidnapping is at risk. Murphy and you are very dangerous witnesses. And you maybe more than Murphy. Because you’re the one who took Galíndez to the Fundación Ranch, to Trujillo’s own house. Where’s your head?”
“I didn’t take Galíndez,” his brother insisted, and he clinked his glass against Antonio’s. “I took some guy I didn’t know, and he was dead drunk. I don’t know anything. Why don’t you trust the Chief? Didn’t he trust me with a really important mission?”
When they said goodbye that night, at the door of Tavito’s house, he had finally, on the insistence of his older brother, said okay, he would think over his suggestion. And not to worry: he’d keep his mouth shut.
It was the last time Antonio saw him alive. Three days after their conversation, Murphy disappeared. When Antonio came back to Ciudad Trujillo, Tavito had been arrested. He was being held incommunicado in La Victoria. Antonio went in person to request an audience with the Generalissimo, but the Chief would not receive him. He tried to speak to Colonel Cobián Parra, head of the SIM, but he had become invisible, and shortly afterward, on Trujillo’s orders, a soldier killed him in his office. In the next forty-eight hours, Antonio called or visited all the leaders and high officials in the regime whom he knew, from the President of the Senate, Agustín Cabral, to the president of the Dominican Party, Álvarez Pina. All of them had the same uneasy expression, all of them said that the best thing he could do, for his own security and theirs, was to stop calling and seeing people who could not help him and whom he was also putting in danger. “It was like banging your head against the wall,” Antonio later told General Juan Tomás Díaz. If Trujillo had received him, he would have begged, he would have gone down on his knees, anything to save Tavito.
Not long after this, at dawn, a SIM car carrying armed caliés in civilian clothes stopped at the door of Tavito de la Maza’s house. They took his body out of the vehicle and carelessly threw it into the heartsease in the little garden at the entrance. And as they were driving away they yelled at Altagracia, who had come to the door in her nightgown and was looking at the corpse in horror:
“Your husband hung himself in jail. We brought him back so you could give him a decent burial.”
“But not even that was the worst thing,” thought Antonio. No, seeing Tavito’s corpse, the rope of his alleged suicide still around his neck, his body tossed out like a dog’s at the entrance to his house by the thuggish killers who were the caliés of the SIM, that wasn’t the worst. Antonio had repeated this to himself dozens, hundreds of times over these four and a half years, as he devoted his days and nights, and the remnants of lucidity and intelligence he still possessed, to planning the revenge that—God willing—would become a reality tonight. The worst had been Tavito’s second death just days after the first one, when, making use of its entire informational and publicity apparatus—El Caribe and La Nación, the Dominican Voice television and radio stations, the radio stations of the Voice of the Tropics and Caribbean Radio, and a dozen small regional newspapers and radio stations—the regime, in one of its cruelest masquerades, published a letter allegedly written by Octavio de la Maza explaining his suicide. His remorse for having killed with his own hands his friend and colleague at Dominican Airlines, the pilot Murphy! Not satisfied with ordering his murder, the Goat, to wipe out all clues in the Galíndez story, added the macabre refinement of turning Tavito into a killer. In this way he got rid of two troublesome witnesses. To make everything even viler, Tavito’s handwritten letter explained why he killed Murphy: the American was a homosexual. Murphy had so pursued Antonio’s younger brother, with whom he had fallen in love, that Tavito, reacting with all the energy of a real man, erased the stain to his honor by killing the degenerate and hid his crime by pretending it was an accident.
He had to bend over where he sat in the Chevrolet, pressing the sawed-off rifle against his stomach, to hide the spasm he had just felt. His wife kept telling him to go to the doctor, the pains might be an ulcer or something even more serious, but he refused. He didn’t need doctors to tell him that his body had deteriorated in recent years, reflecting the bitterness in his spirit. After what happened to Tavito, he had lost all hope, all enthusiasm, all love for this life or the next. Only the idea of revenge kept him active; he lived only to keep the vow he had sworn aloud, terrifying the neighbors in Moca who had come to sit with the De la Mazas—parents, brothers and sisters, brothers- and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, sons and daughters, grandchildren, aunts and uncles—during the wake.
“I swear to God I’ll kill the son of a bitch who did this with my own hands!”
Everybody knew he was referring to the Benefactor, to the Father of the New Nation, to Generalissimo Dr. Rafael L. Trujillo Molina, whose funeral wreath of fresh, fragrant flowers was the most elaborate in the viewing room at the mortuary. The De la Maza family did not dare to refuse it or remove it from the room; it was so visible that everyone who came to cross themselves and say a prayer next to the coffin knew that the Chief had sent his condolences for the tragic death of this aviator, “one of the most faithful, loyal, and brave of my followers,” according to the sympathy card.
On the day following his burial, two military adjutants from the Palace got out of a Cadillac with an official license plate in front of the De la Maza house in Moca. They had come for Antonio.
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all,” First Lieutenant Roberto Figueroa Carrión quickly explained. “His Excellency wishes to see you.”
Antonio didn’t bother to put a pistol in his pocket. He assumed that before he went into the National Palace, if they really were taking him there and not to La Victoria or La Cuarenta, or if they didn’t have orders to throw him over some cliff along the road, they would disarm him. He didn’t care. He knew how strong he was, and he also knew that his strength, doubled by his hatred, would be enough to kill the tyrant, as he had sworn to do the night before. He pondered that decision, resolved to carry it out, knowing they would kill him before he could escape. He would pay that price if he could put an end to the despot who had ruined his life and the life of his family.
When he got out of the official car, the adjutants escorted him to the Benefactor’s office without anyone searching him. The officers must have had precise instructions: as soon as the unmistakable high-pitched voice said, “Come in,” First Lieutenant Roberto Figueroa Carrión and his companion left, allowing him to go in alone. The office was in semidarkness because of the partially closed shutters on the window facing the garden. The Generalissimo, sitting at his desk, wore a uniform that Antonio did not recognize: a long white tunic, with tails and gold buttons and large epaulets with gold-colored fringe on his chest, where a multicolored fan of medals and decorations was hanging. He wore light blue flannel trousers with a white stripe down the sides. He must have been getting ready to attend some military ceremony. The light from the desk lamp illuminated the broad, carefully shaved face, meticulously arranged gray hair, and the small brush mustache that copied Hitler’s (whom, Antonio had heard the Chief say once, he admired, “not for his ideas but for the way he wore a uniform and presided over parades”). That fixed, direct gaze bored into Antonio as soon as he came through the door. Trujillo spoke after observing him for a long time:
“I know you think I had Octavio killed and that his suicide was a farce set up by the Intelligence Service. I had you come to tell you personally that you’re wrong. Octavio was a man of the regime. He was always a loyal Trujillista. I’ve just appointed a commission, under the leadership of the Attorney General of the Republic, Francisco Elpidio Beras. With broad powers to question everyone, military and civilian. If the story of his suicide is a lie, the guilty parties will pay.”
He spoke without animosity and without inflection, looking into Antonio’s eyes in the direct, peremptory manner with which he always spoke to subordinates, both f
riends and enemies. Antonio remained motionless, more determined than ever to attack the hypocrite and wring his neck without giving him time to call for help. As if to make the job easier for him, Trujillo stood and walked toward him with slow, solemn steps. His black shoes shone even brighter than the waxed wood in his office.
“I also authorized the FBI to come here and investigate the death of this Murphy,” he added in the same sharp tone. “It’s a violation of our sovereignty, of course. Would the gringos allow our police to go and investigate the murder of a Dominican in New York, or Washington, or Miami? Let them come. Let the world know we have nothing to hide.”
He was a meter away. Antonio could not endure Trujillo’s unmoving gaze, and he blinked incessantly.
“My hand does not tremble when I have to kill,” he added, after a pause. “Governing sometimes demands that you become stained with blood. I’ve often had to do that for this country. But I am a man of honor. I do justice to those who are loyal, I don’t have them killed. Octavio was loyal, a man of the regime, a proven Trujillista. That’s why I took a risk and kept him out of prison when he went too far in London and killed Luis Bernardino. Octavio’s death will be investigated. You and your family can participate in the commission’s deliberations.”
He turned and, in the same unhurried way, went back to his desk. Why didn’t he attack when he had him so close? He was still asking himself the question four and a half years later. Not because he believed a word of what he was saying. That was part of the melodrama that Trujillo was so fond of and that the dictatorship superimposed on its crimes, like a sarcastic supplement to the tragic deeds it was built on. Why, then? It wasn’t fear of dying, because fear of dying was never one of the many defects he acknowledged in himself. Since the time he was an insurgent and fought the dictator with a small band of Horacistas, he had risked his life many times. It was something more subtle and indefinable than fear: it was the paralysis, the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man, groomed and adorned to the point of absurdity, with his thin high-pitched voice and hypnotist’s eyes, imposed on Dominicans, poor or rich, educated or ignorant, friends or enemies, and it was what held Antonio there, mute, passive, listening to those lies, the lone observer of the hoax, incapable of acting on his desire to attack him and put an end to the witches’ Sabbath that the history of the country had become.