“Why didn’t you do your part, Pupo?” Sighs shook his chest. “What’s going to happen to us now?”
“There was a problem, Bibín. Razor Espaillat showed up, he saw everything. There was nothing I could do. Now…”
“Now we’re fucked,” Bibín said hoarsely, swallowing mucus. “Luis Amiama, Juan Tomás, Antonio de la Maza, Tony Imbert, all of us. But especially you. You, and then me, because I’m your brother. If you love me at all, shoot me right now, Pupo. Fire that submachine gun, make the most of my being drunk. Before they do it. For the sake of what you love best, Pupo.”
At that moment, Álvaro knocked at the bathroom door: they had just discovered the Generalissimo’s body in the trunk of a car at the house of General Juan Tomás Díaz.
He did not close his eyes that night, or the next one, or the one after that, and, probably, in four and a half months did not experience again what sleep had once been for him—resting, forgetting about himself and others, dissolving into a nonexistence from which he returned restored, his energy renewed—although he did lose consciousness often, and spent long hours, days, nights in a mindless stupor without images or ideas, with a firm desire for death to come and free him. Everything mixed up and scrambled, as if time had turned into a stew, a jumble in which before, now, and afterward had no logical sequence but were recurrent. He clearly remembered the sight, when he reached the National Palace, of Doña María Martínez de Trujillo bellowing before the corpse of the Chief: “Let the blood of his assassins run until the last drop!” And, as if it came next, but it could have happened only a day later, the svelte, uniformed, impeccable figure of Ramfis, pale and rigid, leaning without bending over the carved coffin, contemplating the painted face of the Chief, and murmuring: “I won’t be as generous as you were with our enemies, Papa.” It seemed to him that Ramfis was talking not to his father but to him. He gave him a hard embrace and groaned in his ear: “What an irreparable loss, Ramfis. It’s good we have you.”
He saw himself immediately after that, in his parade uniform, the inseparable M-1 submachine gun in his hand, in the crowded church in San Cristóbal, attending the funeral rites for the Chief. Some lines from the address by a much larger President Balaguer—“Here, ladies and gentlemen, split by a flash of treacherous lightning, lies the powerful oak that for more than thirty years defied all thunderbolts and emerged victorious from every storm”—brought tears to his eyes. He listened, sitting next to a stony Ramfis, who was surrounded by bodyguards carrying submachine guns. And he saw himself, at the same time, contemplating (one, two, three days earlier?) the line of countless thousands of Dominicans of all ages, professions, races, and social classes, waiting hours on end, under a merciless sun, to climb the stairs of the Palace and, with hysterical exclamations of grief, with fainting and screaming and offerings to the loas of Voodoo, to pay their final homage to the Chief, the Man, the Benefactor, the Generalissimo, the Father. And in the midst of all that, he was listening to reports from his aides regarding the capture of the engineer Huáscar Tejeda and Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, the end of Antonio de la Maza and General Juan Tomás Díaz in Independencia Park at the corner of Bolívar as they defended themselves with guns, and the almost simultaneous death, a short distance away, of Lieutenant Amador García, who also killed before he could be killed, and the mob’s looting and destruction of the house where his aunt had given him refuge. And he remembered the rumors regarding the mysterious disappearance of his compadre Amiama Tió and Antonio Imbert—Ramfis was offering half a million pesos to anyone with information leading to their capture—and the fall of some two hundred Dominicans, both civilian and military, in Ciudad Trujillo, Santiago, La Vega, San Pedro de Macorís, and half a dozen other places, who had been implicated in the assassination of Trujillo.
All of that was mixed up, but at least it was intelligible. As was the final coherent memory his mind would preserve: how, when the Mass for the Generalissimo lying in state in the San Cristóbal church was over, Petán Trujillo took his arm: “Come with me in my car. Pupo.” In Petán’s Cadillac he knew—it was the last thing he knew with total certainty—that this was his last chance to save himself from what was coming by emptying his submachine gun into the Chief’s brother and into himself, because that ride was not going to end at his house in Gazcue. It ended at San Isidro Air Base, where, Petán lied to him, not bothering to pretend, “there would be a family meeting.” At the entrance to the base, two generals, his brother-in-law Virgilio García Trujillo and the head of the Army General Staff, Tuntin Sánchez, informed him that he was under arrest, accused of complicity with the assassins of the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation. Very pale, avoiding his eyes, they asked for his weapon. Obediently, he handed them the M-1 submachine gun that had not left his side for four days.
They took him to a room with a table, an old typewriter, a pile of blank sheets, and a chair. They asked him to remove his belt and shoes and hand them to a sergeant. He did so, asking no questions. They left him alone, and minutes later Ramfis’s two closest friends, Colonel Luis José (Pechito) León Estévez and Pirulo Sánchez Rubirosa, came in, did not greet him, and told him to write down everything he knew about the conspiracy, giving the full names of the conspirators. General Ramfis—by supreme decree, which the Congress would confirm tonight, President Balaguer had just named him Commander-in-Chief of the Air, Sea, and Land Forces of the Republic—had full knowledge of the plot, thanks to the detainees, all of whom had denounced him.
He sat down at the typewriter and for several hours did what they had ordered. He was a terrible typist; he used only two fingers and made a good number of mistakes that he did not take the time to correct. He told everything, beginning with his first conversation with his compadre Luis Amiama six months earlier, and he named the twenty or so people he knew were implicated, but not Bibín. He explained that for him the decisive factor was the support of the United States for the conspiracy, and that he agreed to preside over the civilian-military junta only when he learned from Juan Tomás that both Consul Henry Dearborn and Consul Jack Bennett, as well as the head of the CIA in Ciudad Trujillo, Lorenzo D. Berry (Wimpy), wanted him to head it. He told only one small lie: that in exchange for his participation, he had demanded that Generalissimo Trujillo be abducted and forced to resign, but under no circumstances was he to be killed. The other conspirators had betrayed him by not keeping this promise. He reread the pages and signed them.
He was alone for a long time, waiting, with a serenity of spirit he had not felt since the night of May 30. When they came for him, it was growing dark. It was a group of officers he did not know. They put him in handcuffs and took him out, not wearing his shoes, to the courtyard of the base, and put him in a van with tinted windows; on it he read the words “Pan-American Institute of Education.” He thought they were taking him to La Cuarenta. He knew that gloomy house on Calle 40, near the Dominican Cement Factory, very well. It had belonged to General Juan Tomás Díaz, who sold it to the State so that Johnny Abbes could convert it into the setting for his elaborate methods of extracting confessions from prisoners. He had even been present, following the Castroite invasion on June 14, when one of those being interrogated, Dr. Tejeda Florentino, sitting on the grotesque Throne—a seat from a jeep, pipes, electric prods, bullwhips, a garrote with wooden ends for strangling the prisoner as he received electric shocks—was mistakenly electrocuted by a SIM technician, who released the maximum voltage. But no, instead of La Cuarenta they took him to El Nueve on the Mella Highway, a former residence of Pirulo Sánchez Rubirosa. It also housed a Throne, one that was smaller but more modern.
He was not afraid. Not now. The immense fear that since the night of Trujillo’s assassination had kept him “mounted”—the term used for those who were drained of themselves and occupied by spirits in Voodoo ceremonies—had disappeared completely. In El Nueve, they stripped him and sat him on the black seat in the middle of a windowless, dimly lit room. The strong smell of excrement and urine
nauseated him. The seat, misshapen and absurd with all its appendages, was bolted to the floor and had straps and rings for the ankles, wrists, chest, and head. Its arms were faced with copper sheets to facilitate the passage of the current. A bundle of wires came out of the Throne and led to a desk or counter, where the voltage was controlled. In the sickly light, as he was strapped into the chair, he recognized the bloodless face of Ramfis between Pechito León Estévez and Sánchez Rubirosa. He had shaved his mustache and was not wearing his eternal Ray-Ban sunglasses. He looked at Pupo with the lost gaze he had seen in Ramfis when he directed the torture and killing of the survivors of Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo in June 1959. Ramfis continued to look at him without saying anything, while a calié shaved him, and another, kneeling, bound his ankles, and a third sprayed perfume around the room. General Román Fernández withstood those eyes.
“You’re the worst of all, Pupo,” he heard Ramfis say suddenly, his voice breaking with sorrow. “Everything you are and everything you have you owe to Papa. Why did you do it?”
“For love of my country,” he heard himself saying.
There was a pause. Ramfis spoke again:
“Is Balaguer involved?”
“I don’t know. Luis Amiama told me they had sounded him out, through his doctor. He didn’t seem very sure. I tend to think he wasn’t.”
Ramfis moved his head and Pupo felt himself thrown forward with the force of a cyclone. The jolt seemed to pound all his nerves, from his head to his feet. Straps and rings cut into his muscles, he saw balls of fire, sharp needles jabbed into his pores. He endured it without screaming, he only bellowed. Although with each discharge—they came one after the other, with intervals when they threw buckets of water at him to revive him—he passed out and could not see, he then returned to consciousness. And his nostrils filled with that perfume housemaids wore. He tried to maintain a certain composure, not humiliate himself by begging for mercy. In the nightmare he would never come out of, he was sure of two things: Johnny Abbes García never appeared among his torturers, and at one point somebody—it might have been Pechito León Estévez or General Tuntin Sánchez—let him know that Bibín’s reflexes were better than his because he had managed to fire a bullet into his mouth when the SIM came for him at his house on Arzobispo Nouel, corner of José Reyes. Pupo often wondered if his children, Álvaro and José René, whom he had never told about the conspiracy, had managed to kill themselves.
Between sessions in the electric chair, they dragged him, naked, to a damp cell, where buckets of pestilential water made him respond. To keep him from sleeping they taped his lids to his eyebrows with adhesive tape. When, in spite of having his eyes open, he fell into semiconsciousness, they woke him by beating him with baseball bats. At various times they stuffed inedible substances into his mouth; at times he detected excrement, and vomited. Then, in a rapid descent into sub-humanity, he could keep down what they gave him. In the early sessions with electricity, Ramfis interrogated him. He repeated the same question over and over again, to see if he would contradict himself. (“Is President Balaguer implicated?”) He responded, making superhuman efforts to have his tongue obey him. Until he heard laughter, and then the colorless, rather feminine voice of Ramfis: “Shut up, Pupo. You have nothing to tell me. I know everything. Now you’re only paying for your betrayal of Papa.” It was the same voice, with its discordant changes in pitch, that Ramfis had at the orgy of blood following June 14, when he lost his mind and the Chief had to send him to a psychiatric hospital in Belgium.
At the time of this last conversation with Ramfis, he could no longer see him. They had removed the tape, ripping off his eyebrows in the process, and a drunken, joyful voice announced: “Now you’ll have some dark, so you’ll sleep real good.” He felt the needle piercing his eyelids. He did not move while they sewed them shut. It surprised him that sealing his eyes with thread caused him less suffering than the shocks on the Throne. By then, he had failed in his two attempts to kill himself. The first time, he banged his head with all the strength he had left against the wall in his cell. He passed out, and barely bloodied his hair. The second time, he almost succeeded. Climbing up the bars—they had removed his handcuffs in preparation for another session on the Throne—he broke the bulb that lit the cell. On all fours, he swallowed every bit of glass, hoping that an internal hemorrhage would end his life. But the SIM had two doctors on permanent call and a small first-aid station supplied with what was necessary to prevent tortured prisoners from dying by their own hand. They took him to the infirmary, made him swallow a liquid that induced vomiting, and flushed out his intestines. They saved him, so that Ramfis and his friends could go on killing him in stages.
When they castrated him, the end was near. They did not cut off his testicles with a knife but used a scissors, while he was on the Throne. He heard excited snickers and obscene remarks from individuals who were only voices and sharp odors of armpits and cheap tobacco. He did not give them the satisfaction of screaming. They stuffed his testicles into his mouth, and he swallowed them, hoping with all his might that this would hasten his death, something he never dreamed he could desire so much.
At one point he recognized the voice of Modesto Díaz, the brother of General Juan Tomás Díaz, who, people said, was as intelligent as Egghead Cabral or the Constitutional Sot. Had they put him in the same cell? Were they torturing him too? Modesto’s voice was bitter and accusatory:
“We’re here because of you, Pupo. Why did you betray us? Didn’t you know this would happen to you? Repent for having betrayed your friends and your country.”
He did not have the strength to articulate a sound or even open his mouth. Some time later—it could have been hours, days, or weeks—he heard a conversation between a SIM doctor and Ramfis Trujillo:
“Impossible to keep him alive any longer, General.”
“How much time does he have?” It was Ramfis, no doubt about it.
“A few hours, perhaps a day if I double the serum. But in his condition, he won’t survive another shock. It’s incredible that he’s lasted four months, General.”
“Move away, then. I won’t let him die a natural death. Stand behind me, you don’t want any cartridges to hit you.”
With great joy, General José René Román felt the final burst of gunfire.
21
When Dr. Marcelino Vélez Santana, who had gone out for news, came back to the airless attic of Dr. Robert Reid Cabral’s little Moorish-style house, where they had already spent two days, to place a sympathetic hand on Turk’s shoulder and tell him that the caliés had stormed his house on Mahatma Gandhi and taken away his wife and children, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá decided to turn himself in. He was sweating, gasping for breath. What else could he do? Let those savages kill his wife and children? They were certainly being tortured. He felt too much anguish to pray for his family. That was when he told his companions in the hideout what he was going to do.
“You know what that means, Turk,” Antonio de la Maza argued with him. “They’ll abuse and torture you in the most barbaric way before they kill you.”
“And they’ll go on hurting your family in front of you, to make you betray everybody,” insisted General Juan Tomás Díaz.
“Nobody will make me open my mouth, even if they burn me alive,” he swore with tears in his eyes. “The only one I’ll name is that stinking Pupo Román.”
They asked him not to leave the hiding place before they did, and Salvador agreed to stay one more night. The thought of his wife and children—fourteen-year-old Luis and Carmen Elly, who had just turned four—in the dungeons of the SIM, surrounded by sadistic thugs, kept him awake all night, gasping for breath, not praying, not thinking about anything else. Remorse gnawed at his heart: how could he have exposed his family like this? And the guilt he felt for shooting Pedro Livio Cedeño moved to the middle distance. Poor Pedro Livio! Where was he now? What horrors had been done to him?
On the afternoon of June 4, he was the
first to leave Reid Cabral’s house. He hailed a cab at the corner and gave the address, on Calle Santiago, of the engineer Feliciano Sosa Mieses, his wife’s cousin, with whom he had always been good friends. All he wanted was to find out if he had any news of her and the children, and the rest of the family, but that was impossible. Feliciano himself opened the door, and when he saw him, he made a gesture—Vade retro!—as if the devil were standing in front of him.
“What are you doing here, Turk?” he exclaimed, furious. “Don’t you know I have a family? Do you want them to kill us? Get away! For the sake of everything you hold dear, get out of here!”
He closed the door with an expression of fear and revulsion that left Salvador not knowing what to do. He went back to the cab, feeling a depression that turned his bones to water. Despite the heat, he was dying of cold.
“You’ve recognized me, haven’t you?” he asked the driver, when he was already in his seat.
The man, who wore a baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows, did not turn around to look at him.
“I recognized you when you got in,” he said very calmly. “Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. I’m anti-Trujillista too. If we have to run, we’ll run together. Where do you want to go?”
“To a church,” said Salvador. “It doesn’t matter which one.”
He would put himself in the hands of God and, if possible, make confession. After he had unburdened his conscience, he would ask the priest to call the guards. But after driving toward the center of town for a short time, along streets where the shadows were deepening, the driver warned him:
“That guy turned you in, señor. There are the caliés.”