It was enough for him to walk into the office, click his heels, and announce himself in the most martial voice his throat could produce—“Second Lieutenant García Guerrero, at your service, Excellency!”—to feel electrified. “Come in,” said the sharp voice of the man who sat at the other end of the room behind a desk covered in red leather, writing and not looking up. The young man took a few steps and stood at attention, not moving a muscle or thinking, looking at the meticulously groomed gray hair and impeccable attire—blue jacket and vest, white shirt with immaculate collar and starched cuffs, silvery tie secured with a pearl—and at his hands, one resting on a sheet of paper that the other covered with rapid strokes of blue ink. On his left hand he saw the ring with the precious iridescent stone, which, according to the superstitious, was an amulet given to him when he was a young man, a member of the Constabulary Guard pursuing the “bandits” who rebelled against the United States’ military occupation, by a Haitian wizard who assured him that as long as he kept it on he would be invulnerable to enemies.
“A good service record, Lieutenant,” he heard him say.
“Thank you very much, Excellency.”
The silver-colored head moved and those large staring eyes, without brightness and without humor, met his. “I’ve never been afraid in my life,” the boy later confessed to Salvador. “Until that gaze fell on me, Turk. It’s true. As if he were digging up my conscience.” There was a long silence while those eyes examined his uniform, his belt, his buttons, his tie, his visored hat. Amadito began to perspire. He knew that the slightest carelessness in dress provoked such disgust in the Chief that he could erupt into violent recriminations.
“A service record this good cannot be stained by marriage to the sister of a Communist. In my government, friends and enemies don’t mix.”
He spoke quietly, not releasing him from his penetrating gaze. Amadito thought that at any moment the thin, high-pitched voice would crack.
“Luisa Gil’s brother is one of the June 14 subversives. Did you know that?”
“No, Excellency.”
“Now you know.” He cleared his throat and added, without changing his tone: “There are a lot of women in this country. Find another one.”
“Yes, Excellency.”
He saw him make a gesture of assent, ending the interview.
“Permission to withdraw, Excellency.”
He clicked his heels and saluted. He left with a martial step, hiding the anguish that paralyzed him. A soldier obeyed orders, especially if they came from the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation, who had taken a few minutes of his time to speak to him in person. If he had given that order to him, a privileged officer, it was for his own good. He had to obey. He did, clenching his teeth. His letter to Luisa did not contain a single word that was not true: “With a heavy heart, and though I suffer because of it, I must renounce my love for you and tell you, sadly, that we cannot marry. My superiors forbid it because of your brother’s anti-Trujillista activities, something you hid from me. I understand why you did. But by the same token I hope you also understand the difficult decision I find myself obliged to make, against my will. I will always think of you with love, but we will not see each other again. I wish you good luck. Don’t be angry with me.”
Had the beautiful, happy, slender girl from La Romana forgiven him? Though he hadn’t seen her again, he hadn’t replaced her in his heart. Luisa had married a prosperous farmer from Puerto Plata. But if she eventually forgave him for breaking off their engagement, she never could have forgiven him for the other thing, if she ever found out about it. He would never forgive himself. And even if, in a few moments, the bullet-ridden body of the Goat were lying at his feet—he wanted to empty his pistol into those cold iguana eyes—he would not forgive him either. “At least Luisa will never know.” Not her, not anybody except those who planned the ambush.
And, of course, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá devastated by hatred, alcohol, and despair, Lieutenant García Guerrero had come directly to his house at 21 Mahatma Gandhi, in the small hours of that morning, from the brothel of Pucha Vittini, alias Pucha Brazobán, at the top of Calle Juana Saltitopa, where he had been taken, afterward, by Colonel Johnny Abbes and Major Roberto Figueroa Carrión, so that with a few drinks and a good piece of ass he could forget the unpleasantness. “Unpleasantness,” “sacrifice for the Fatherland,” “test of will,” “blood offering to the Chief”: those were the things they had said to him. Then they congratulated him for having earned a promotion. Amadito took a drag of his cigarette and tossed it onto the road: a tiny explosion of fireworks when it hit the asphalt. “If you don’t think about something else, you’re going to cry,” he told himself, mortified at the thought that Imbert, Antonio, and Salvador might see him burst into sobs. They would think he was afraid. He clenched his teeth so hard it hurt. He had never been as sure about anything as he was about this. While the Goat lived, he would not, he’d be nothing but the ambulatory despair he had been since that January night in 1961 when the world collapsed around him, and he had run to 21 Mahatma Gandhi and taken refuge in Salvador’s friendship so he wouldn’t put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He told him everything. Not right away. Because when Turk opened the door, surprised at dawn by the pounding that roused him, his wife, and his children from bed and from sleep, and found on the threshold Amadito’s broken silhouette reeking of alcohol, the young man could not say a word. He opened his arms and threw them around Salvador. “What is it, Amadito? Who died?” They took him to his bedroom, put him to bed, let him give vent to his feelings, babbling incoherently. Urania Mieses prepared mint tea that she fed to him by the spoonful, as if he were a little boy.
“Don’t tell us anything you’ll be sorry for,” Turk interrupted.
Over his pajamas he wore a kimono with ideograms. He sat at a corner of the bed, looking at Amadito with affection.
“I’ll leave you alone with Salvador.” His Aunt Urania kissed him on the forehead and stood up. “So you can talk more freely, so you can tell him what it would make you sad to tell me.”
Amadito thanked her. Turk turned off the overhead light. The shade on the bedside lamp had a design that the light of the bulb turned red. Clouds? Animals? The lieutenant thought that if a fire broke out, he wouldn’t move.
“Go to sleep, Amadito. Things will seem less tragic in the light of day.”
“It won’t make any difference, Turk. Day or night I’ll still make myself sick. It’ll be worse when I sober up.”
It began that afternoon, in the headquarters of the military adjutants, next to Radhamés Manor. He had just returned from Boca Chica, where Major Roberto Figueroa Carrión, liaison between the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Generalissimo Trujillo, had sent him to deliver a sealed envelope to General Ramfis Trujillo at die Dominican Air Force Base. The lieutenant entered the major’s office to report on his mission, and Figueroa Carrión received him with a mischievous expression. He showed him the red file folder on his desk.
“Can you guess what I have here?”
“A week’s leave for me at the beach, Major, sir?”
“Your promotion to first lieutenant, boy!” His superior happily handed him the folder.
“I stood there with my mouth open, because it wasn’t my turn.” Salvador didn’t move. “I still have eight months before I can apply for a promotion. I thought it was a consolation prize because I was denied permission to get married.”
Salvador, at the foot of the bed, was ill at ease and made a face.
“Didn’t you know, Amadito? Your friends, your superiors, didn’t they tell you about the test of loyalty?”
“I thought they were just stories,” Amadito said with conviction, with fury. “I swear. People don’t bring that up, they don’t brag about that. I didn’t know. It took me by surprise.”
Was that true, Amadito? One more lie, one more pious lie in the string of lies that had been his life since he enrolled at the Military Academy. Since his
birth, for he had been born almost at the same time as the Era. Of course you had to know, had to suspect; of course, in the Fortress at San Pedro de Macorís, and then, among the military adjutants, you had heard, intuited, discovered, in the jokes and boasts, in the excited moments, the bravado, that the privileged, the elect, the officers entrusted with positions of greatest responsibility were subjected to a test of loyalty to Trujillo before they were promoted. You knew very well it existed. But now Second Lieutenant García Guerrero also knew that he never had wanted to know in detail what the test involved. Major Figueroa Carrión shook his hand and repeated something he had heard so often he had begun to believe it:
“You’ll have a great career, boy.”
He ordered him to pick him up at his house at eight that night: they would go for a drink to celebrate his promotion, and take care of a little business.
“Bring the jeep.” The major dismissed him.
At eight o’clock, Amadito was at his superior’s house. The major did not invite him in. He must have been watching at the window, because before Amadito could get out of the jeep, he appeared at the door. He jumped into the jeep, and without responding to the lieutenant’s salute, he ordered, in a falsely casual voice:
“To La Cuarenta, Amadito.”
“To the prison, Major, sir?”
“Yes, to La Cuarenta,” the lieutenant repeated. “You know who was waiting for us there, Turk.”
“Johnny Abbes,” murmured Salvador.
“Colonel Abbes García,” Amadito corrected him with quiet irony. “The head of the SIM, yes.”
“Are you sure you want to tell me this, Amadito?” The young man felt Salvador’s hand on his knee. “Won’t you hate me afterward because you know that I know too?”
Amadito knew him by sight. He had seen him slipping like a shadow along the corridors of the National Palace, getting out of his black bulletproof Cadillac or climbing into it in the gardens of Radhamés Manor, entering or leaving the Chief’s office, something that Johnny Abbes and probably nobody else in the entire country could do—appear at any hour of the day or night at the National Palace or the private residence of the Benefactor and be received immediately—and always, like many of his comrades in the Army, Navy, or Air Force, he had felt a secret shudder of revulsion at that flabby figure stuffed into a Colónel’s uniform, the personified negation of the bearing, agility, martial air, virility, strength, and elegance that military men had to display—the Chief said it every time he spoke to his soldiers on the National Holiday and on Armed Forces Day—that fat-cheeked, funereal face with the little mustache trimmed in the style of Arturo de Córdoba or Carlos López Moctezuma, the most popular Mexican actors, and a capon’s dewlaps hanging down over his short neck. Though they said so only among their closest friends and after a good many glasses of rum, the officers despised Colonel Johnny Abbes García because he wasn’t a real soldier. He hadn’t earned his stripes the way they had, by studying, going through the academy, living in barracks, sweating to rise through the ranks. He had his as payment for the undoubtedly dirty services he had rendered to justify his appointment as the all-powerful head of the Military Intelligence Service. And they distrusted him for the grim acts that were attributed to him, the disappearances, the executions, the sudden falls into disgrace of powerful people—like the recent plunge of Senator Agustín Cabral—and for the terrible accusations, denunciations, and calumnies in the newspaper column “The Public Forum” that appeared every morning in El Caribe and kept people in a state of anxiety because their fate depended on whatever was said about them there, and for the intrigues and the operations directed against sometimes apolitical and decent people, peaceable citizens who had fallen somehow into the infinite nets of espionage that Johnny Abbes García and his vast army of caliés spread into every corner of Dominican society. Many officers—Lieutenant García Guerrero among them—felt authorized in their heart of hearts to despise this individual in spite of the confidence the Generalissimo had in him, because they thought, as did many men in the government, including, apparently, Ramfis Trujillo himself, that Colonel Abbes García’s undisguised cruelty brought the regime into disrepute and justified its critics. And yet, Amadito recalled a discussion after a dinner well watered by beer, among a group of military adjutants, when his immediate superior, Major Figueroa Carrión, came to Abbes’s defense: “The colonel may be a devil, but he’s useful to the Chief: everything bad is attributed to him and only the good to Trujillo. What better service is there? For a government to last thirty years, it needs a Johnny Abbes who’ll stick his hands in shit. And his body and head, if he has to. He takes the heat. Our enemies, and sometimes our friends, concentrate their hatred on him. The Chief knows this, that’s why he keeps him close. If the colonel didn’t watch the Chief’s back, maybe the same thing would have happened to him that happened to Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, Batista in Cuba, Perón in Argentina.”
“Good evening, Lieutenant.”
“Good evening, Colonel, sir.”
Amadito raised his hand to his visor and saluted, but Abbes García extended his hand—a hand as soft as a sponge, wet with perspiration—and patted him on the back.
“Come this way.”
Near the sentry box crowded with half a dozen guards, past the iron grillwork at the entrance, was a small room that must have been used as an administrative office, with a table and a couple of chairs. It was dimly lit by a single bulb dangling from a long cord covered with flies; a cloud of insects buzzed around it. The colonel closed the door, pointed them to the chairs. A guard came in with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red (“The brand I prefer because Juanito Caminante’s my namesake,” the colonel joked), glasses, an ice bucket, and several bottles of mineral water. While he served the drinks, the colonel talked to the lieutenant as if Major Figueroa Carrión weren’t there.
“Congratulations on your new stripe. And that service record. I’m very familiar with it. The SIM recommended your promotion. For distinguished military and civic service. I’ll tell you a secret. You’re one of the few officers denied permission to marry who obeyed without requesting a review. That’s why the Chief is rewarding you, moving your promotion ahead by a year. A toast with Juanito Caminante!”
Amadito took a long drink. Colonel Abbes García had almost filled the glass with whiskey, with only a splash of water, and the liquid was like an explosion in his brain.
“At that point, in that place, with Johnny Abbes pouring you a drink, didn’t you guess what was coming?” murmured Salvador. The young man detected the grief flooding through his friend’s words.
“That it would be hard and ugly, yes, Turk,” he replied, trembling. “But never what was going to happen.”
The colonel poured another round. The three men had begun to smoke, and the head of the SIM spoke of how important it was not to allow the enemy within to raise his head, to crush him every time he attempted to act.
“Because as long as the enemy within is weak and disunited, it doesn’t matter what the foreign enemy does. Let the United States holler, let the OAS kick, let Venezuela and Costa Rica howl, they can’t do us any harm. In fact, they unite Dominicans like a fist around the Chief.”
He had a thin drawling voice, and he avoided the eyes of the person he was talking to. His eyes were small, dark, rapid, evasive, moving constantly as if seeing things hidden from other people. From time to time he wiped away sweat with a large red handkerchief.
“Especially the military.” He paused to flick the ash from his cigarette onto the floor. “And especially the military elite, Lieutenant García Guerrero. To which you now belong. The Chief wanted you to hear this.”
He paused again, drew deeply on his cigarette, took a drink of whiskey. Only then did he seem to discover that Major Figueroa Carrión existed:
“Does the lieutenant know what the Chief expects of him?”
“He doesn’t need anybody to tell him, he has more brains than any officer in his class.” The major had
the face of a toad, and alcohol had accentuated and reddened his swollen features. Amadito had the impression that their conversation was a rehearsed play. “I imagine he knows; if not, he doesn’t deserve his new stripe.”
There was another pause while the colonel filled their glasses a third time. He put in the ice cubes with his hands. “Salud” and he drank and they drank. Amadito told himself he liked rum and Coca-Cola a thousand times more than whiskey, it was so bitter. And not until that moment did he understand the joke about Juanito Caminante. “How dumb not to get it,” he thought. The cololnel’s red handkerchief was so strange! He had seen white, blue, gray handkerchiefs. But red ones! What an idea.
“You’re going to have greater and greater responsibilities,” said the colonel, with a solemn air. “The Chief wants to be sure you’re up to the job.”
“What am I supposed to do, Colonel, sir?” All this preamble irritated Amadito. “I’ve always obeyed the orders of my superiors. I’ll never disappoint the Chief. This is a test of loyalty, right?”
The colonel, his head lowered, was staring at the table. When he looked up, the lieutenant noticed a gleam of satisfaction in those furtive eyes.
“It’s true, for officers with balls, Trujillistas down to the marrow of their bones, you don’t have to sweeten the pill.” He stood up. “You’re right, Lieutenant. We’ll finish our little piece of business and celebrate your new stripe at Puchita Brazobán’s place.”
“What did you have to do?” It was a struggle for Salvador to speak; his throat was raw, his expression morose.
“Kill a traitor with my own hands. That’s how he said it: ‘And without your hands trembling, Lieutenant.’ ”
When they went out to the courtyard of La Cuarenta, Amadito felt his temples throbbing. Beside a large bamboo tree, next to the chalet that had been converted into a prison and torture center for the SIM, near the jeep they had come in, was another, almost identical jeep, its headlights turned off. In the back seat, two guards with rifles flanked a man whose hands were tied and whose mouth was covered by a towel.