He stops speaking, because another grimace convulses his devastated face. He reacts immediately, becomes serious, philosophizes:
“I know how you feel, Egghead, what you’re going through. It’s happened to me a couple of times in my twenty-some years of friendship with the Chief. It didn’t go as far as it has with you, but there was a distancing on his part, a coldness I couldn’t explain. I remember my worry, the solitude I felt, the sensation of having lost my compass. But everything was resolved, and the Chief honored me again with his confidence. It must be intrigue on the part of some envious man who can’t forgive your talent, Agustín. But, as you already know, the Chief is a just man. I’ll speak to him this afternoon, you have my word.”
Cabral rose to his feet, very moved. There were still decent people left in the Dominican Republic.
“I’ll be at home all day, Manuel,” he said, shaking his hand warmly. “Don’t forget to tell him that I’m prepared to do anything to regain his confidence.”
“I thought of him as a Hollywood star, Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn,” says Urania. “I was very disappointed when I saw him that night. He wasn’t the same person. They had cut out half his throat. He looked like anything but a Don Juan.”
Her Aunt Adelina, her cousins, her niece, listen in silence, exchanging glances. Even the parrot Samson seems interested, for he hasn’t silenced her with his screeching for some time.
“You’re Urania? Agustín’s little girl? How you’ve grown, and how pretty you are! I’ve known you since you were in diapers. Come over here, my girl, and give me a kiss.”
“He dribbled when he talked, he looked retarded. He was very affectionate with me. I couldn’t believe that this human wreck was Manuel Alfonso.”
“I have to talk with your papa,” he said, taking a step toward the interior of the house. “You really are pretty. You’ll break a lot of hearts. Is Agustín home? Go on, call him.”
“He had spoken to Trujillo and had come to our house from Radhamés Manor to report on what he had done. Papa couldn’t believe it. ‘The only one who didn’t turn his back on me, the only one who offered his hand,’ he kept repeating.”
“Didn’t you just dream that Manuel Alfonso did anything for him?” Aunt Adelina exclaims, disconcerted. “Agustín would have told Aníbal and me right away.”
“Let her go on, don’t interrupt so much, Mama,” Manolita intervenes.
“That night I made a promise to Our Lady of Altagracia if she would help my papa out of his difficulty. Can you imagine what it was?”
“That you’d enter a convent?” Her cousin Lucinda laughs.
“That I’d remain a virgin the rest of my life.” Urania laughs.
Her cousins and her niece laugh too, but unwillingly, hiding their embarrassment. Aunt Adelina remains serious, not taking her eyes off her and not hiding her impatience: what else, Urania, what else?
“That child has grown so big and so pretty,” Manuel Alfonso repeats as he drops into an armchair across from Agustín Cabral. “She reminds me of her mother. The same languid eyes as your wife, Egghead, the same slim, graceful body.”
He thanks him with a smile. He has brought the ambassador to his study instead of receiving him in the living room, so that the girl and the servants won’t hear. He thanks him again for taking the trouble to come in person instead of calling him. The senator speaks in a rush, feeling his heart coming out with each word. Was he able to talk to the Chief?
“Of course, Agustín. I promised you I would, and I did. We talked about you for almost an hour. It won’t be easy. But you mustn’t lose hope. That’s the main thing.”
He wore an impeccably tailored dark suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a white-flecked blue tie held in place by a pearl. The top of a white silk handkerchief peeked out of the breast pocket of his jacket, and since he had raised his trousers slightly when he sat down to keep them from losing their crease, his blue hose, without a single wrinkle, was visible. His shoes gleamed.
“He’s very unhappy with you, Egghead.” It seemed that the wound from his surgery was bothering him, because from time to time he contorted his lips in a strange way, and Agustín Cabral could hear his dentures click. “It’s not anything concrete but a number of things that have piled up over the past few months. The Chief is exceptionally perceptive. Nothing escapes him, he detects the smallest changes in people. He says that since this crisis began, since the Pastoral Letter, since the problems with the OAS unleashed by the monkey Betancourt and the rat Muñoz Marín, you’ve been growing cold. You haven’t shown the devotion he expected.”
The senator nodded: if the Chief noticed it, perhaps it was true. Nothing premeditated, of course, and certainly not due to any lessening of his admiration and loyalty. Something unconscious, fatigue, the tremendous tension of this past year, the hemispheric conspiracy against Trujillo by the Communists and Fidel Castro, the priests, Washington and the State Department, Figueres, Muñoz Marín, and Betancourt, economic sanctions, the despicable actions of the exiles. Yes, yes, it was possible that, unintentionally, his dedication to his work, the Party, the Congress, had flagged.
“The Chief doesn’t accept discouragement or weakness, Agustín. He wants us all to be like him. Tireless, a rock, a man of iron. You know that.”
“And he’s right.” Agustín Cabral banged his fist on his small desk. “Because he is the way he is, he has made this country. He is always in the saddle, Manuel, as he said in the campaign of 1940. He has a right to demand that we emulate him. I disappointed him without realizing it. Perhaps because I didn’t succeed in persuading the bishops to proclaim him Benefactor of the Church? He wanted that as compensation after the villainy of the Pastoral Letter. I formed part of the commission, along with Balaguer and Paíno Pichardo. Was it that failure, do you think?”
The ambassador shook his head.
“He’s very tactful. Even if he feels unhappy about that, he wouldn’t have told me so. Perhaps it is one of the reasons. You have to understand him. For thirty-one years he has been betrayed by the people he helped the most. How could a man not be sensitive when his best friends stab him in the back?”
“I remember his scent,” says Urania, after a pause. “Since then, and it’s no lie, every time a man wearing scent happens to be near me, I see Manuel Alfonso again. And hear that gibberish he spoke on the two occasions I had the honor of enjoying his charming company.”
Her right hand crumples the runner on the table. Her aunt, cousins, and niece, disoriented by her hostility and sarcasm, hesitate, feeling uncomfortable.
“If talking about this upsets you, don’t do it, Urania,” Manolita suggests.
“It sickens me, it makes me want to vomit,” Urania replies. “It fills me with hatred and disgust. I never told anyone about this. Maybe it will do me good to finally get it off my chest. And who better than my family to listen?”
“What do you think, Manuel? Will the Chief give me another chance?”
“Why don’t we have some whiskey, Egghead,” the ambassador exclaims, avoiding a reply. He holds up his hands, cutting off the senator’s objections. “I know I shouldn’t, I’m not allowed to drink alcohol. Bah! Is it worth living if you have to deprive yourself of the good things? Great whiskey is one of those things.”
“Excuse me for not asking earlier. I’ll have a drink too. Let’s go down to the living room. Uranita must be in bed by now.”
But she still hasn’t gone to her room. She has just finished supper and stands when she sees them coming down the stairs.
“You were just a little girl the last time I saw you,” Manuel Alfonso compliments her, smiling. “Now you’re a very beautiful young lady. You probably haven’t even noticed the change, Agustín.”
“See you tomorrow, Papa.” Urania kisses her father. She is going to shake the visitor’s hand, but he offers his cheek. She barely kisses him, and blushes: “Good night, señor.”
“Call me Uncle Manuel,” and he kisses her on t
he forehead.
Cabral tells the butler and maid that they can go to bed, and he brings in the bottle of whiskey, the glasses, the ice bucket. He pours his friend a drink and another for himself, both on the rocks.
“Salud, Manuel.”
“Salud, Agustín.”
The ambassador savors his drink with satisfaction, half closing his eyes. “Ah, how nice,” he exclaims. But he has difficulty getting the liquor down, and his face contracts with pain.
“I’ve never been a drunkard, never lost control of my actions,” he says. “But I’ve always known how to enjoy life. Even when I was wondering if I would eat the next day, I knew how to derive pleasure from small things: a good drink, a good cigar, a landscape, a well-cooked dish, a woman who bends her waist gracefully.”
He laughs nostalgically, and Cabral follows suit, unwillingly. How can he get him back to the only thing that matters? To be courteous, he controls his impatience. He hasn’t had a drink for days, and two or three sips go to his head. Still, after refilling Manuel Alfonso’s glass, he also fills his own.
“Nobody would think you ever had money problems, Manuel.” He tries to flatter him. “I always think of you as elegant, lavish, extremely generous, paying for everyone.”
The former model, swirling his glass, nods, and is gratified. The light from the chandelier shines directly down on his face, and only now does Cabral notice the sinuous scar that twists around his throat. Difficult, for someone so proud of his face and body, to have been cut up like that.
“I know what it means to go hungry, Egghead. As a young man, in New York, I even slept in the streets like a tramp. There were many days when my only meal was a plate of beans or a roll. Without Trujillo, who knows what would have happened to me? I always liked women, but I never could play the gigolo, like our good Porfirio Rubirosa. I probably would have ended up as a bum on the Bowery.”
He drinks what is left in his glass in one swallow. The senator fills it again.
“I owe him everything. What I have, what I became.” With his head lowered, he contemplates the ice cubes. “I’ve rubbed elbows with ministers and presidents of the most powerful countries, I’ve been invited to the White House, played poker with President Truman, gone to the Rockefellers’ parties. The tumor was removed at the Mayo Clinic, the best in the world, by the best surgeon in the United States. Who paid for the operation? The Chief, of course. Do you understand, Agustín? Like our country, I owe everything to Trujillo.”
Agustín Cabral regretted all the times, when in the familiarity of the Country Club or Congress or an outlying estate, in a circle of intimate friends (he believed they were intimate), he had laughed at jokes about the former Colgate model who owed his high diplomatic posts, and his position as Trujillo’s adviser, to the soaps, talcs, and perfumes he ordered for His Excellency and his good taste in choosing the ties, suits, shirts, pajamas, and shoes worn by the Chief.
“I also owe him everything I am and everything I’ve accomplished, Manuel,” he declared. “I understand you very well. And that’s why I’m prepared to do anything to regain his friendship.”
Manuel Alfonso looked at him, his head craning forward. He did not say anything for a long time but continued to scrutinize him, as if weighing, millimeter by millimeter, the seriousness of his words.
“Then let’s get to work, Egghead!”
“He was the second man, after Ramfis Trujillo, to flirt with me and pay me compliments,” says Urania. “Telling me I was pretty, I looked like my mama, what nice eyes. I had already gone to parties with boys, and danced. Five or six times. But no one had ever talked to me like that. Because Ramfis’s compliments were paid to a little girl. The first man who flirted with me as if I were a woman was my uncle, Manuel Alfonso.”
She has said all this very quickly, with mute fury, and none of her relatives asks any questions. The silence in the small dining room is like the one that precedes the thunder in a violent summer storm. A distant siren cuts through the night. Samson paces nervously along his wooden bar, ruffling his feathers.
“He seemed like an old man to me, the mangled way he talked made me laugh, the scar on his neck scared me.” Urania wrings her hands. “Why would he bother to flirt with me, why just then? But afterward I thought a good deal about all the compliments he paid me.”
She falls silent again, exhausted. Lucinda asks a question—“You were fourteen, weren’t you?”—that seems stupid to Urania. Lucinda knows they were born the same year. Fourteen, what a deceptive age. They had stopped being children but were not yet women.
“Three or four months before that, I had my first period,” she whispers. “I think it made me look more mature.”
“It just occurred to me, it occurred to me when I came in,” says the ambassador, extending his hand and pouring himself another whiskey; he serves his host as well. “I’ve always been this way: the Chief comes first, then me. You’re upset, Agustín. Am I wrong? I didn’t say anything, forget it. I’ve forgotten it. Salud, Egghead!”
Senator Cabral takes a long drink. The whiskey burns his throat and reddens his eyes. Was that a rooster crowing at this hour?
“It’s just, it’s just…,” he repeats, not knowing what to add.
“Let’s forget it. I hope you haven’t taken this the wrong way, Egghead. Forget it! Let’s forget it!”
Manuel Alfonso has stood up. He walks among the innocuous furnishings in the living room, neat, clean, but lacking the feminine touch an efficient housekeeper can give. Senator Cabral thinks—how many times has he thought this over the years?—that he made a mistake remaining alone after his wife’s death. He should have married, had other children, then perhaps this misfortune would not have happened. Why didn’t he? Was it for Uranita’s sake, as he told everyone? No. It was so he could devote more time to the Chief, dedicate days and nights to him, prove to him that nothing and no one was more important in the life of Agustín Cabral.
“I didn’t take it the wrong way.” He makes an enormous effort to appear calm. “But I am disconcerted. It’s something I wasn’t expecting, Manuel.”
“You think she’s a little girl, you didn’t realize she had become a young woman.” Manuel Alfonso rattles the ice cubes in his glass. “A pretty girl. You must be proud of having a daughter like her.”
“Of course.” And adds, mindlessly: “She’s always at the head of her class.”
“Do you know something, Egghead? I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. Not to regain his confidence, not to show him that I’m capable of any sacrifice for him. Simply because nothing would give me more satisfaction, more happiness, than to have the Chief give pleasure to a daughter of mine and take his pleasure with her. I’m not exaggerating, Agustín. Trujillo is one of those anomalies in history. Charlemagne, Napoleon, Bolívar: that breed of men. Forces of Nature, instruments of God, makers of nations. He’s one of them, Egghead. We’ve had the privilege of being at his side, watching him act, collaborating with him. That’s something beyond price.”
He drained his glass and Agustín Cabral raised his to his mouth but barely wet his lips. He was no longer dizzy, but now his stomach was churning. At any moment he would start to vomit.
“She’s still a little girl,” he stammered.
“That’s even better!” exclaimed the ambassador. “The Chief will appreciate the gesture even more. He’ll understand that he made a mistake, that he judged you too hastily, letting himself be guided by his own sensitivities, or listening to your enemies. Don’t think only of yourself, Agustín. Don’t be an egotist. Think of your daughter. What will happen to her if you lose everything and end up in jail accused of mismanagement and fraud?”
“Do you think I haven’t thought about that, Manuel?”
The ambassador shrugged.
“It just occurred to me when I saw how pretty she’s become,” he repeated. “The Chief appreciates beauty. If I say to him: ‘Egghead, to prove his affection and loyalty, wants to offer you his pretty daughter, wh
o’s still a virgin,’ he won’t refuse. I know him. He’s a true gentleman, with a tremendous sense of honor. His heart will be touched. He’ll call you. He’ll return what’s been taken from you. Uranita’s future will be secure. Think of her, Agustín, and shake off your antiquated prejudices. Don’t be an egotist.”
He picked up the bottle again and splashed more whiskey into his glass and Cabral’s. He used his hand to put more ice cubes in both glasses.
“It just occurred to me when I saw how attractive she’s become,” he intoned, for the fourth or fifth time. Did it bother him, did his throat drive him mad? He moved his head and caressed the scar with his fingertips. “If it offends you, I didn’t say anything.”
“You said vile and evil,” Aunt Adelina suddenly explodes. “You said that about your father who’s had a living death and is only waiting for the end. About my brother, the person I’ve loved and respected most. You won’t leave this house without explaining the reason for your insults, Urania.”
“I said vile and evil because there are no stronger words,” Urania says very slowly. “If there were, I would have said them. He had his reasons, certainly. His extenuating circumstances, his motivations. But I haven’t forgiven him and I’ll never forgive him.”
“Why do you help him if you hate him so much?” The old woman vibrates with indignation; she is very pale, as if she were about to faint. “Why the nurse, and the food? Why don’t you let him die?”
“I want him to go on with his living death, I want him to suffer.” She speaks very calmly, her eyes lowered. “That’s why I help him, Aunt Adelina.”
“But, but what did he do to make you hate him so much, to make you say something so horrible?” Lucindita raises her arms, incapable of believing what she has just heard. “Holy God!”
“You’ll be surprised at what I’m going to tell you, Egghead,” Manuel Alfonso exclaims dramatically. “When I see a beauty, a real woman, the kind that makes you turn around, I don’t think of myself. I think of the Chief. Yes, of him. Would he like to hold her in his arms, make love to her? I’ve never told this to anyone. Not even the Chief. But he knows. Knows that for me, he always comes first, even in this. And make no mistake, I like women a lot, Agustín. Don’t think I’ve made the sacrifice of giving him gorgeous women to flatter him, or to get favors or positions. That’s what contemptible people think, what pigs think. Do you know why I do it? Out of love, compassion, pity. You can understand, Egghead. You and I know what his life has been. Working from dawn till midnight, seven days a week, twelve months a year. Never resting. Taking care of important matters and trivial ones. Constantly making decisions that determine the life and death of three million Dominicans. In order to bring us into the twentieth century. And having to be concerned about the resentful and the mediocre, the ingratitude of so many bastards. Doesn’t a man like him deserve to have an occasional distraction? To enjoy a few minutes with a woman? One of the few compensations in his life, Agustín. Which is why I feel proud to be what so many vipers say I am: the Chief’s procurer. I’ll drink to the honor, Egghead!”