She isn’t sad or depressed. She is saved from that, perhaps, by the sun coming in the windows and illuminating objects with a brilliant light, outlining them in all their detail, exposing defects, discolorations, age. How shabby, abandoned, and old the bedroom—the house—is now, of the once powerful President of the Senate, Agustín Cabral. What made you think of Ramfis Trujillo? She has always been fascinated by the strange directions memory takes, the geographies it creates in response to mysterious stimuli and unforeseen associations. Ah, yes, it has to do with the piece you read in The New York Times the night before you left the United States. The article was about the younger brother, the stupid, ugly Radhamés. What a report! What an ending. The journalist had made a thorough investigation. Radhamés had lived, penniless, for some years in Panama, engaged in suspicious activities, nobody knew exactly what, until he vanished. The disappearance occurred the previous year, and none of the efforts of his relatives and the Panamanian police—his small room in Balboa was searched, and his meager belongings were still there—turned up any clues. Until, finally, one of the Colombian drug cartels let it be known in Bogotá, with the syntactical pomp characteristic of the Athens of America, that “the Dominican citizen Don Radhamés Trujillo Martínez, a resident of Balboa in our sister Republic of Panama, has been executed in an unnamed location in the Colombian jungle after unequivocally demonstrating dishonorable conduct in the fulfillment of his obligations.” The New York Times reported that for years a derelict Radhamés had apparently earned his living serving the Colombian Mafia. Wretched work, no doubt, judging by the modest circumstances in which he lived: acting as a gofer for the bosses, renting apartments for them, driving them to hotels, airports, brothels, or, perhaps, acting as an intermediary for money laundering. Did he try to steal a few dollars to make his life a little better? Since he was so short on brains, they caught him right away. They abducted him to the forests of Darién, where they were lords and masters. Perhaps they tortured him with the same kind of ferocity used by him and Ramfis in 1959, when they tortured and killed the invaders of Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo, and in 1961, when they tortured and killed the people involved in the events of May 30.
“A just ending, Papa.” Her father, who has been dozing, opens his eyes. “Whoever lives by the sword, dies by the sword. It was true in the case of Radhamés, if he really did die like that. Because nothing has been confirmed. The article also said that there are those who swear he was an informant for the DEA while he worked for the Colombian mafiosi, and that for services rendered, the agency changed his face and put him under their protection. Rumors, conjectures. In any event, what an ending for the darling children of your Chief and the Bountiful First Lady. The handsome Ramfis killed in a car accident in Madrid. An accident, some say, arranged by the CIA and Balaguer to stop the firstborn, who was conspiring in Madrid, prepared to invest millions to recover the family fiefdom. Radhamés transformed into a poor devil murdered by the Colombians for trying to steal the dirty money he helped to launder, or for being an agent of the DEA. And Angelita, Her Majesty Angelita I, whose lady-in-waiting I was, do you know where she is now? In Miami, brushed by the wings of the divine dove. A born-again Christian. In one of the thousands of evangelical sects driven by madness, idiocy, anguish, fear. That’s how the queen of this country has ended up. In a clean little house in very bad taste, a hybrid of gringo and Caribbean vulgarity, devoted to missionary work. They say she can be seen on the street corners of Dade County, in Latino and Haitian neighborhoods, singing hymns and exhorting passersby to open their hearts to the Lord. What would the Heroic Father of the New Nation say to all that?”
Again the invalid raises and lowers his shoulders, and blinks, and becomes lethargic. He lowers his eyelids and curls up, ready for a little nap.
It’s true, you’ve never felt hatred for Ramfis, Radhamés, or Angelita, nothing like what Trujillo and the Bountiful First Lady still inspire in you. Because, somehow, the three children have paid in degradation or violent deaths for their part in the family’s crimes. And you’ve never been able to avoid a certain benevolent feeling toward Ramfis. Why, Urania? Perhaps because of his emotional crises, his depressions and fits of madness, the mental instability his family always concealed and which, following the murders he ordered in June 1959, obliged Trujillo to commit him to a psychiatric hospital in Belgium. In all of Ramfis’s actions, even the cruelest, there was something caricatured, fraudulent, pathetic. Like his spectacular gifts to the Hollywood actresses Porfirio Rubirosa fucked free of charge (when he wasn’t making them pay him). Or the way he had of botching the plans devised for him by his father. Hadn’t it been grotesque, for instance, when Ramfis ruined the reception given in his honor by the Generalissimo to compensate for his failure at Fort Leavenworth? He had the Congress—“Did you propose the law, Papa?”—name Ramfis Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, and, on his return, he was to be recognized as such at a military review on the Avenida, at the foot of the obelisk. Everything was arranged, and the troops in formation, on that morning when the yacht Angelita, which the Generalissimo sent to pick him up in Miami, entered the port on the Ozama River, and Trujillo himself, accompanied by Joaquín Balaguer, went to the docking berth to welcome him and drive him to the parade. What astonishment, what disappointment, what confusion overwhelmed the Chief when he boarded the yacht and discovered the calamitous condition, the slobbering incapacity in which a shipboard orgy had left poor Ramfis. He could barely stand, he was incapable of speaking. His slack, recalcitrant tongue emitted grunts instead of words. His bulging eyes were glassy, his clothes streaked with vomit. And his cronies, and the women who accompanied them, were in even worse shape. Balaguer described it in his memoirs: Trujillo turned white and trembled with indignation. He ordered the cancellation of the military parade and Ramfis’s swearing-in as Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, before he left, he picked up a glass and proposed a toast meant as a symbolic slap in the face of the worthless drone (his inebriation prevented him from understanding): “Here’s to work, the only thing that will bring prosperity to the Republic.”
Urania is overcome by another attack of hysterical laughter, and the invalid opens his eyes in terror.
“Don’t be afraid.” Urania becomes serious. “I can’t help laughing when I imagine the scene. Where were you at that moment, when your Chief discovered his boy drunk, surrounded by his drunken whores and buddies? On the platform on the Avenida, dressed in your morning coat, waiting for the new Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces? What explanation was given? The parade is canceled because General Ramfis is suffering from delirium tremens?”
She laughs again under the profound gaze of the invalid.
“A family to laugh at and cry over, not to be taken seriously,” Urania murmurs. “Sometimes you must have been ashamed of all of them. And felt fear and remorse, when you allowed yourself to, though that kind of audacity would be kept very secret. I’d like to know what you would have thought of the melodramatic fates met by the Chief’s darling children. Or the sordid story of the final years of Doña María Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady, the terrible, the vengeful, who screamed her demand that Trujillo’s assassins have their eyes put out and be skinned alive. Do you know that in the end she was eroded by arteriosclerosis? That the grasping woman secretly got all those millions and millions of dollars away from the Chief? And had all the numbers to the secret accounts in Switzerland and hid them from her children? With good reason, no doubt. She was afraid they’d steal her millions and bury her in an old-age home, where she’d spend her final years not being any trouble to them. She, with her hardening arteries, was the one who had the last laugh. I would have given anything to see the Bountiful First Lady in Madrid, stupefied by misfortune and losing her memory, but maintaining, from the depths of her avarice, enough lucidity not to reveal to her dear children the numbers of the Swiss accounts. And to see the efforts the poor things made—in Madrid, in the house
of homely, stupid Radhamés, or in Miami, in Angelita’s house, before she turned to mysticism—to have her remember where she had scribbled them down or hidden them. Can you picture it, Papa? How they must have hunted, and pulled open, and broken, and slashed, looking for the hiding place. They took her to Miami, they brought her back to Madrid. And they never found it. She took her secret to the grave. What do you think of that, Papa? Ramfis managed to squander a few million that he got out of the country in the months following his father’s death, because the Generalissimo (was this true, Papa?) insisted on not taking a penny out of the country in order to oblige his family and followers to die here, to face the consequences. But Angelita and Radhamés were out on the street. And thanks to her hardening arteries, the Bountiful First Lady died poor too, in Panama, where Kalil Haché buried her, taking her to the cemetery in a taxi. She left the family’s millions to the Swiss bankers! To cry over or to laugh at, but in no case to be taken seriously. Isn’t that so, Papa?”
She laughs again, until tears come to her eyes. As she dries them, she struggles against a fragment of depression growing inside her. The invalid observes her, accustomed to her presence. He no longer seems interested in her monologue.
“Don’t think I’ve become a hysteric,” she says with a sigh. “Not yet, Papa. What I’m doing now, digging up the past, rooting around in memories, is something I never do. This is my first vacation in years. I don’t like vacations. When I was a girl here, I used to like them. But I never did again, not after I went to Adrian, thanks to the sisters. I’ve spent my life working. I never took a vacation at the World Bank. Or at the law firm in New York. I don’t have time to go around giving monologues on Dominican history.”
It’s true, your life in Manhattan is exhausting. Every hour is accounted for, starting at nine, when you walk into your office at 47th and Madison. By then you’ve run for three-quarters of an hour in Central Park, if the weather is good, or done aerobics at the Fitness Center on the corner, where you have a membership. Your morning is a series of interviews, reports, discussions, consultations, research in the archives, working lunches in a private dining room at the office or at a nearby restaurant, and your afternoon is just as busy and frequently does not end until eight. Weather permitting, you return home on foot. You prepare a salad and open a container of yogurt before watching the news on television, you read for a while and go to bed, so tired that the letters in the book or the images on the screen begin to dance before ten minutes have passed. There is always one trip a month, sometimes two, within the United States or to Latin America, Europe, or Asia; and recently to Africa as well, where some investors are finally daring to risk their money, and for that they come to the firm for legal advice. That’s your specialty: the legal aspect of financial operations in companies anywhere in the world. A specialty you came to after working for many years in the Legal Department of the World Bank. The trips are more fatiguing than your days in Manhattan. Flying five, ten, twelve hours, to Mexico City, Bangkok, Tokyo, Rawalpindi, or Harare, and going immediately to give or listen to reports, discuss figures, evaluate projects; changing landscapes and climates, from heat to cold, from humidity to drought, from English to Japanese, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, and Hindi, using interpreters whose mistakes can cause erroneous decisions. Which is why her five senses are always alert, in a state of concentration that leaves her drained, so that at the inevitable receptions she can barely stifle her yawns.
“When I have a Saturday and Sunday to myself, I’m happy to stay home, reading Dominican history,” she says, and it seems to her that her father nods. “A rather peculiar history, it’s true. But I find it restful. It’s my way of not losing my roots. Even though I’ve lived there twice as long as I lived here, I haven’t turned into a gringa. I still talk like a Dominican, don’t I, Papa?”
Is there an ironic little glimmer in the invalid’s eyes?
“Well, more or less a Dominican, one from up there. What do you expect from somebody who has lived more than thirty years with gringos, who goes for weeks without speaking Spanish? Do you know, I was sure I’d never see you again? I wasn’t going to come back, not even to bury you. It was a firm decision. I know you’d like to know why I changed my mind. Why I’m here. The truth is, I don’t know. I did it on impulse. I didn’t think much about it. I asked for a week’s vacation and here I am. I must have come for something. Maybe it was you. To find out how you were. I knew you were sick, that after the stroke it was no longer possible to talk to you. Would you like to know what I’m feeling? What I felt when I came back to the house of my childhood? When I saw the ruin you’ve become?”
Her father is paying attention again. He is waiting, with curiosity, for her to continue. What do you feel, Urania? Bitterness? A certain melancholy? Sadness? The old anger reborn? “The worst thing is that I don’t think I feel anything,” she thinks.
The front doorbell rings. It keeps chiming, vibrating in the heat-filled morning.
8
The hair that was missing on his head jutted aggressively out of his ears in jet-black clumps, a kind of grotesque compensation for the baldness of the Constitutional Sot. Had he given him that nickname too, before he rebaptized him, in his heart of hearts, as the Walking Turd? Probably. Since his youth he had been good at making up nicknames. Many of the savage labels he stamped on people became part of their very flesh and eventually replaced their real names. That’s what had happened to Senator Henry Chirinos. No one in the Dominican Republic, except for the newspapers, called him by name; they used only his devastating epithet: the Constitutional Sot. He had the habit of stroking the greasy bristles that nested in his ears, and though the Generalissimo, obsessed with cleanliness, had forbidden him to do so in his presence, he was doing it now, and, to make matters worse, he was alternating one revolting act with another: smoothing the hairs in his nose. He was nervous, very nervous. The Benefactor knew why: he was bringing him a negative report on his enterprises. But responsibility for things going badly did not lie with Chirinos; it was the fault of the sanctions imposed by the OAS, which were strangling the country.
“If you keep picking at your nose and ears, I’ll call in the adjutants and put you behind bars,” he said in a bad temper. “I’ve forbidden you to do those disgusting things here. Are you drunk?”
The Constitutional Sot started in his chair, which faced the Benefactor’s desk. He moved his hands away from his face.
“I haven’t had a drop of alcohol,” he apologized in confusion. “You know I don’t drink during the day, Chief. Just in the evening, and at night.”
He wore a suit that the Generalissimo thought of as a monument to bad taste: grayish green, with glints of iridescence; like everything he put on, it looked as if he had squeezed his fat body into the suit with a shoehorn. Jiggling on his white shirt was a bluish tie with yellow dots, where the harsh gaze of the Benefactor detected grease spots. He thought with distaste that he had gotten the stains while eating, because Senator Chirinos ate by taking enormous mouthfuls, wolfing them down as if he feared his neighbors would snatch away his plate, and chewing with an open mouth, spraying a shower of food all around him.
“I swear there’s not a drop of alcohol in my body,” he repeated. “Just the black coffee I had for breakfast.”
Probably it was true. When he saw him come into the office a moment ago, balancing his elephantine body and advancing very slowly, testing the floor before putting down his foot, he thought he was intoxicated. No; he must have somatized all his drinking; even when he was sober, he carried himself with the trembling uncertainty of an alcoholic.
“You’re pickled in alcohol: even when you don’t drink you look drunk,” he said, examining him from head to foot.
“It’s true,” Chirinos quickly acknowledged, making a theatrical gesture. “I am a poète maudit, Chief. Like Baudelaire and Rubén Darío.”
He had ashen skin, a double chin, thin, greasy hair, and little eyes set deep behind puffy lids. His nose, flatten
ed since the accident, was like a boxer’s, and his almost lipless mouth added a perverse quality to his brash ugliness. He had always been so disagreeably ugly that ten years earlier, after the car crash that he miraculously survived, his friends thought plastic surgery would improve his looks. It only made them worse.
That he was still a man trusted by the Benefactor, a member of his narrow circle of intimates that included Virgilio Álvarez Pina, Paíno Pichardo, Egghead Cabral (now in disgrace), or Joaquín Balaguer, was proof that when it was time to choose his collaborators, the Generalissimo did not let himself be guided by personal likes or dislikes. In spite of the repugnance his physical appearance, slovenliness, and bad manners always inspired in the Chief, from the beginning of his regime Henry Chirinos had been favored with the delicate tasks that Trujillo entrusted to people who were not only reliable but capable. And he was one of the most capable of the men accepted into that exclusive club. An attorney who served as a constitutionalist, while still very young he had been, along with Agustín Cabral, the principal author of the Constitution ordered by Trujillo in the early days of the Era, and of all the amendments made since then. He had also composed the most important institutional and ordinary laws, and written almost all the legal decisions adopted by the Congress to legitimize the needs of the regime. There was no one like him for giving, in parliamentary speeches filled with Latin phrases and quotations that were often in French, the appearance of juridical necessity to the most arbitrary decisions of the Executive, or for refuting, with devastating logic, every proposal that Trujillo disapproved of. His mind, organized like a legal code, immediately found a technical argument to provide a veneer of legality to any decision made by Trujillo, whether it was a ruling by the Treasury or the Supreme Court, or a law passed by Congress. A good part of the legal web of the Era had been spun by the perverse skill of this great pettifogger (that’s what he had been called once, in Trujillo’s presence, by Senator Agustín Cabral, his close friend and enemy within the circle of favorites).