“I remember.” Manolita, embarrassed at interrupting, apologizes with a grimace: “They played ‘Bésame Mucho’ all day, on the radio, at parties.”
Standing next to a window that let in a warm breeze and a dense aroma of fields, grass, trees, she heard voices. The damaged one of Manuel Alfonso. The other, high-pitched, rising and falling, could only be Trujillo’s. She felt a prickle at the back of her neck and on her wrists, where the doctor took her pulse, an itch that always came when she had exams, and even now, in New York, before she made important decisions.
“I thought about throwing myself out the window. I thought about getting down on my knees, begging, crying. I thought I had to clench my teeth and let him do whatever he wanted, so I could go on living and take my revenge on Papa one day. I thought a thousand things while they were talking down below.”
In her rocking chair, Aunt Adelina gives a start, opens her mouth. But says nothing. She is as white as a sheet, her deep-set eyes filled with tears.
The voices stopped. There was a parenthesis of silence; then, footsteps climbing the stairs. Had her heart stopped beating? In the dim light of the bar, the silhouette of Trujillo appeared, in an olive-green uniform, without a jacket or tie. He held a glass of cognac in his hand. He walked toward her, smiling.
“Good evening, beautiful,” he whispered, bowing. And he extended his free hand, but when Urania, in an automatic movement, put forward her own, instead of shaking it Trujillo raised it to his lips and kissed it: “Welcome to Mahogany House, beautiful.”
“The story about his eyes, about Trujillo’s gaze, I had heard it often. From Papa, from Papa’s friends. At that moment, I knew it was true. A gaze that dug deep, all the way down to the bottom. He smiled, he was very gallant, but that gaze emptied me, left me a hollow skin. I was no longer myself.”
“Benita hasn’t offered you anything?” Not letting go of her hand, Trujillo led her to the best-lit part of the bar, where a fluorescent tube cast a bluish light. He offered her a seat on a two-person sofa. He examined her, moving his eyes slowly up and down, from her head to her feet, openly, as he would examine new bovine and equine acquisitions for the Fundación Ranch. In his gray, fixed, inquisitive eyes she perceived no desire, no excitement, but only an inventory, a gauging of her body.
“He was disappointed. Now I know why, but that night I didn’t. I was slender, very thin, and he liked full-bodied women with prominent breasts and hips. Voluptuous women. A typically tropical taste. He even must have thought about sending this skeleton back to Ciudad Trujillo. Do you know why he didn’t? Because the idea of breaking a virgin’s cherry excites men.”
Aunt Adelina moans. Her wrinkled fist raised, her mouth half opened in an expression of horror and censure, she implores her, grimacing, but does not manage to say a word.
“Forgive my frankness, Aunt Adelina. It’s something he said, later. I’m quoting him exactly, I swear: ‘Breaking a virgin’s cherry excites men. Petán, that animal Petán, gets more excited breaking them with his finger.’”
He would say it afterward, when he had lost control and his mouth was vomiting disjointed phrases, sighs, curses, discharges of excrement to ease his bitterness. Now, he still behaved with studied correctness. He did not offer her what he was drinking, Carlos I might burn the insides of a girl so young. He would give her a glass of sweet sherry. He served her himself and made a toast, clinking glasses. Though she barely wet her lips, Urania felt something flame in her throat. Did she try to smile? Did she remain serious, showing her panic?
“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “We were close together on that sofa. The glass of sherry was trembling in my hand.”
“I don’t eat little girls,” Trujillo said with a smile, taking her glass and placing it on a table. “Are you always so quiet or is it only now, beautiful?”
“He called me beautiful, something that Manuel Alfonso had called me too. Not Urania, Uranita, girl. Beautiful. It was a game the two of them were playing.”
“Do you like to dance? Sure you do, like all the girls your age,” said Trujillo. “I like to, a lot. I’m a good dancer, though I don’t have time to go to dances. Come on, let’s dance.”
He stood up and Urania did too. She felt his strong body, his somewhat protruding belly rubbing against her stomach, his cognac breath, the warm hand holding her waist. She thought she was going to faint. Lucho Gatica wasn’t singing “Bésame Mucho” now, but “Alma Mía.”
“He really did dance very well. He had a good ear, and he moved like a young man. I was the one who lost the beat. We danced two boleros, and a guaracha by Toña la Negra. Merengues too. He said they danced the merengue in clubs and decent homes now thanks to him. Before, there had been prejudices, and respectable people said it was music for blacks and Indians. I don’t know who was changing the records. When the last merengue ended, he kissed me on the neck. A light kiss that gave me gooseflesh.”
Holding her by the hand, their fingers intertwined, he walked her back to the sofa and sat down very close to her. He examined her, amused, as he breathed in and drank his cognac. He seemed serene and content.
“Are you always a sphinx? No, no. It must be that you have too much respect for me.” Trujillo smiled. “I like beautiful girls who are discreet, who let themselves be admired. Indifferent goddesses. I’m going to recite a poem, it was written for you.”
“He recited a poem by Pablo Neruda. Into my ear, brushing my ear, my hair, with his lips and his little mustache: ‘I like it when you’re quiet, it’s as if you weren’t here; as if your eyes had flown away, as if a kiss had closed your mouth.’ When he came to ‘mouth,’ his hand moved to my face and he kissed me on the lips. That night I did so many things for the first time: I drank sherry, wore Mama’s jewelry, danced with an old man of seventy, and received my first kiss on the mouth.”
She had gone to parties with boys and danced, but a boy had kissed her only once, on the cheek, at a birthday party in the mansion of the Vicini family, at the intersection of Máximo Gómez and Avenida George Washington. His name was Casimiro Sáenz, the son of a diplomat. He asked her to dance, and when they had finished she felt his lips on her face. She blushed to the roots of her hair, and at Friday confession with the school chaplain, when she mentioned the sin, her voice broke with embarrassment. But that kiss was nothing like this one: the little brush mustache of His Excellency scratched her nose, and now, his tongue, its tip hot and sticky, was trying to force open her mouth. She resisted and then parted her lips and teeth: a wet, fiery viper pushed into her mouth in a frenzy, moving greedily. She felt herself choking.
“You don’t know how to kiss, beautiful.” Trujillo smiled at her, kissing her again on the hand, agreeably surprised. “You’re a little virgin, aren’t you?”
“He had become aroused,” says Urania, staring at nothing. “He had an erection.”
Manolita gives a short, hysterical laugh, but her mother, her sister, her niece don’t follow suit. Her cousin lowers her eyes in confusion.
“I’m sorry, I have to talk about erections,” says Urania. “If the male becomes aroused, his sex stiffens and grows larger. When he put his tongue in my mouth, His Excellency became aroused.”
“Let’s go up, beautiful,” he said, his voice somewhat thickened. “We’ll be more comfortable. You’re going to discover something wonderful. Love. Pleasure. You’ll like it. I’ll teach you. Don’t be afraid of me. I’m not an animal like Petán, I don’t enjoy being brutal to girls. I like them to enjoy it too. I’ll make you happy, beautiful.”
“He was seventy and I was fourteen,” Urania specifies for the fifth or tenth time. “We were a mismatched couple, climbing that staircase with the metal railing and heavy wooden bars. Holding hands, like sweethearts. The grandfather and his granddaughter on their way to the bridal chamber.”
The lamp on the night table was lit, and Urania saw the square wrought-iron bed, the mosquito netting raised, and she heard the blades of the fan turning slowly
on the ceiling. A white embroidered spread covered the bed, and a number of pillows and cushions were piled against the headboard. It smelled of fresh flowers and grass.
“Don’t undress yet, beautiful,” Trujillo murmured. “I’ll help you. Wait, I’ll be right back.”
“Do you remember how nervous we were when we talked about losing our virginity, Manolita?” Urania turns toward her cousin. “I never imagined I’d lose it in Mahogany House with the Generalissimo. I thought: ‘If I jump off the balcony, Papa will really be sorry.’”
He soon returned, naked under a blue silk robe with white flecks and wearing garnet-colored slippers. He took a drink of cognac, left his glass on a dresser among photographs of himself surrounded by his grandchildren, and, grasping Urania by the waist, sat her down on the edge of the bed, on the space left open by the mosquito netting, two great butterfly wings crossed over their heads. He began to undress her, slowly. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, one button after another, and removed her belt. Before taking off her dress, he kneeled, and with some difficulty leaned forward and bared her feet. Carefully, as if a sudden movement of his fingers could shatter the girl, he pulled off her nylon stockings, caressing her legs as he did so.
“Your feet are cold, beautiful,” he murmured tenderly. “Are you cold? Come here, let me warm them for you.”
Still kneeling, he rubbed her feet with both hands. From time to time he lifted them to his mouth and kissed them, beginning at the instep, going down to her toes and around to her heels, asking with a sly little laugh if he was tickling her, as if he were the one feeling a joyful itch.
“He spent a long time like that, holding my feet. In case you’re interested, I didn’t feel the least excitement, not for a second.”
“You must have been so scared,” Lucindita says encouragingly.
“Not then, not yet. Later on, I was terrified.”
With difficulty His Excellency stood, and sat down again on the edge of the bed. He took off her dress, the pink bra that held her budding little breasts, the triangle of her panties. She allowed him to do it, not offering any resistance, her body limp. When Trujillo slid the pink panties down her legs, she noticed that His Excellency’s fingers were hurrying; they were sweaty, burning the skin where they touched her. He made her lie down. He stood, took off his robe, and lay down beside her, naked. Carefully, he moved his fingers through the girl’s sparse pubic hair.
“He was still very excited, I think. When he began to touch and caress me. And kiss me, his mouth always forcing my mouth open. Kissing my breasts, my neck, my back, my legs.”
She did not resist; she allowed herself to be touched, caressed, kissed, and her body obeyed with the movements and postures that His Excellency’s hands indicated for her. But she did not return the caresses, and when her eyes were not closed, she kept them glued on the slow blades of the fan. Then she heard him say to himself: “Breaking a virgin’s cherry always excites men.”
“The first dirty word, the first vulgarity of the night,” Urania declares. “Later, he would say much worse. That was when I realized that something was happening to him. He began to get angry. Because I was still, limp, because I didn’t kiss him back?”
That wasn’t it: she understood that now. Whether or not she participated in her own deflowering wasn’t anything His Excellency cared about. To feel satisfied, it was enough for her to have an intact cherry that he could break, making her moan—howl, scream—in pain, with his battering ram of a prick inside her, squeezed tight by the walls of that newly violated intimate place. It wasn’t love, not even pleasure, that he expected of Urania. He had agreed to the young daughter of Senator Agustín Cabral coming to Mahogany House only to prove that Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, despite his seventy years, despite his prostate problems, despite his headaches with priests, Yankees, Venezuelans, conspirators, was still a real man, a stud with a prick that could still get hard and break all the virgin cherries that came his way.
“I had no experience, but I knew.” Her aunt, cousins, and niece lean their heads forward to hear her whisper. “Something was happening to him, I mean down below. He couldn’t. He was about to go wild and forget all his good manners.”
“That’s enough playing dead, beautiful,” she heard him order, a changed man. “On your knees. Between my legs. That’s it. Take it in your hands and mouth. And suck it, the way I sucked your cunt. Until it wakes up. Too bad for you if it doesn’t, beautiful.”
“I tried, I tried. In spite of my terror, my disgust. I did everything. I squatted on my haunches, I put it in my mouth, I kissed it, I sucked it until my gorge rose. Soft, soft. I prayed to God it would stop.”
“That’s enough, Urania, that’s enough!” Aunt Adelina isn’t crying. She looks at her in horror, without compassion. Her eyes roll back in her head, the whites bulging, sclerotic; she is shocked, violently agitated. “What are you telling us for, Urania? My God, that’s enough!”
“But I failed,” Urania insists. “He covered his eyes with his arm. He didn’t say anything. When he moved his arm away, he hated me.”
His eyes were red and his pupils burned with a yellowish, feverish light of rage and shame. He looked at her without a hint of courtesy, with belligerent hostility, as if she had done him irreparable harm.
“You’re wrong if you think you’re leaving here a virgin so you can laugh at me with your father,” he spelled out, with mute fury, spitting as he spoke.
He seized her by the arm and threw her down beside him. Assisted by movements of his legs and waist, he mounted her. That mass of flesh crushed her, pushed her down into the mattress; the smell of cognac and rage on his breath made her dizzy. She felt her muscles and bones crumbling, ground to dust. She was suffocating, but that did not prevent her from feeling the roughness of that hand, those fingers, exploring, digging, forcing their way into her. She felt herself pierced, stabbed with a knife; a lightning bolt ran from her head down to her feet. She cried out, feeling as if she were dying.
“Go on and screech, you little bitch, see if you learn your lesson,” the wounding, offended voice of His Excellency spat at her. “Now open up. Let me see if it’s really broken or if you’re faking it.”
“It really was. I had blood on my legs; it stained him, and the spread, and the bed.”
“That’s enough, that’s enough! Why tell us more, Urania?” her aunt shouts. “Come, let’s make the sign of the cross and pray. For the sake of what you hold most dear, Urania. Do you believe in God? In Our Lady of Altagracia, patron saint of Dominicans? Your mother was so devoted to her, Uranita. I remember her getting ready every January 21 for the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Higüey. You’re full of rancor and hate. That’s not good. No matter what happened to you. Let’s pray, Urania.”
“And then,” says Urania, ignoring her, “His Excellency lay on his back again and covered his eyes. He was still, very still. He wasn’t sleeping. He let out a sob. He began to cry.”
“To cry?” Lucindita exclaims.
Her reply is a sudden jabbering. The five women turn their heads: Samson is awake and announces it by chattering.
“Not for me,” declares Urania. “For his enlarged prostate, his dead prick, for having to fuck virgins with his fingers, the way Petán liked to do.”
“My God, Urania, for the sake of what you hold most dear,” her Aunt Adelina implores, crossing herself. “No more.”
Urania caresses the old woman’s wrinkled, spotted hand.
“They’re horrible words, I know, things that shouldn’t be said, Aunt Adelina.” Her voice sweetens. “I never use them, I swear. Didn’t you want to know why I said those things about Papa? Why, when I went to Adrian, I didn’t want anything to do with the family? Now you know why.”
From time to time he sobs, and his sighs make his chest rise and fall. A few white hairs grow between his nipples and around his dark navel. He keeps his eyes hidden under his arm. Has he forgotten about her? Has she been erased by his overpowering bitter
ness and suffering? She is more frightened than before, when he was caressing her or violating her. She forgets about the burning, the wound between her legs, her fear of the bloodstains on her thighs and the bedspread. She does not move. Be invisible, cease to exist. If the weeping man with hairless legs sees her, he won’t forgive her, he’ll turn the rage of his impotence, the shame of his weeping, on her and annihilate her.
“He said there was no justice in this world. Why was this happening to him after he had fought so hard for this ungrateful country, these people without honor? He was talking to God. The saints. Our Lady. Or maybe the devil. He shouted and begged. Why was he given so many trials? The cross of his sons that he had to bear, the plots to kill him, to destroy the work of a lifetime. But he wasn’t complaining about that. He knew how to beat flesh-and-blood enemies. He had done that since he was young. What he couldn’t tolerate was the low blow, not having a chance to defend himself. He seemed half crazed with despair. Now I know why. Because the prick that had broken so many cherries wouldn’t stand up anymore. That’s what made the titan cry. Laughable, isn’t it?”
But Urania wasn’t laughing. She listened, not moving, scarcely daring to breathe, hoping he wouldn’t remember she was there. His soliloquy was discontinuous, fragmented, incoherent, interrupted by long silences; he raised his voice and shouted, or lowered it until it was almost inaudible. A pitiful noise. Urania was fascinated by that chest rising and falling. She tried not to look at his body, but sometimes her eyes moved along his soft belly, white pubis, small, dead sex, hairless legs. This was the Generalissimo, the Benefactor of the Nation, the Father of the New Nation, the Restorer of Financial Independence. The Chief whom Papa had served for thirty years with devotion and loyalty, and presented with a most delicate gift: his fourteen-year-old daughter. But things didn’t happen as the senator hoped. And that meant—Urania’s heart filled with joy—he wouldn’t rehabilitate Papa; maybe he’d put him in prison, maybe he’d have him killed.