The Feast of the Goat (17 page)

It had been this malaise of so many years’ duration—thinking one thing and doing something that contradicted it every day—that led him, in the secret recesses of his mind, to condemn Trujillo to death, to convince himself that as long as Trujillo lived, he and many other Dominicans would be condemned to this awful queasy sickness of constantly having to lie to themselves and deceive everyone else, of having to be two people in one, a public lie and a private truth that could not be expressed.

The decision did him good; it raised his morale. His life stopped being a mortifying duplicity when he could share his true feelings with someone else. His friendship with Salvador Estrella Sadhalá was like a gift from heaven. With Turk he could talk freely against everything around him; his moral integrity, the sincerity with which he tried to accommodate his behavior to the religion he professed with a devotion Tony had never seen in anyone else, made Salvador his model as well as his best friend.

Shortly after they became close friends, Imbert began to frequent clandestine groups, thanks to his cousin Moncho. Although he left the meetings with the feeling that these girls and boys were risking their freedom, their futures, their lives but would not find an effective way to fight Trujillo, the hour or two he spent with them after arriving at a strange house—a different one each time, taking a thousand detours, following messengers identified with different code names—gave him a reason for living, cleared his conscience, and centered his life.

Guarina was dumbstruck when finally, so that some calamity would not take her completely by surprise, Tony began revealing to her that, contrary to all appearances, he was no longer a Trujillista and was even working in secret against the government. She did not try to dissuade him. She did not ask what would happen to their daughter, Leslie, if he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in prison, like Segundo, or, even worse, if they killed him.

His wife and daughter did not know about tonight; they thought he was playing cards at Turk’s house. What would happen to them if this failed?

“Do you trust General Román?” he said hurriedly, to force himself to think about something else. “Are you sure he’s one of us?” Pupo Román, married to Trujillo’s niece, was the brother-in-law of Generals José and Virgilio García Trujillo, the Chief’s favorite nephews.

“If he weren’t with us, we’d all be in La Cuarenta by now,” said Antonio de la Maza. “He’s with us as long as we meet his conditions: he has to see the body.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Tony murmured. “What does the Minister of the Armed Forces stand to gain from this? He has everything to lose.”

“He hates Trujillo more than you and I do,” replied De la Maza. “And so do many of the men at the top. Trujillism is a house of cards. It’ll collapse, you’ll see. Pupo has commitments from a lot of men in the military; they’re only waiting for his orders. He’ll give them, and tomorrow this will be a different country.”

“If the Goat comes,” Estrella Sadhalá grumbled in the back seat.

“He’ll come, Turk, he’ll come,” the lieutenant repeated one more time.

Antonio Imbert sank again into his thoughts. Would his country wake tomorrow to find itself liberated? He wanted that with all his strength, but even now, minutes before they would act, it was hard for him to believe. How many people were in the conspiracy besides General Román? He never wanted to find out. He knew about four or five, but there were many more. Better not to know. He always thought it crucial that the conspirators know as little as possible so as not to put the operation at risk. He had listened with interest to everything Antonio de la Maza told them about the commitment the head of the Armed Forces had made to assume power if they executed the tyrant. In this way the Goat’s close relatives and the leading Trujillistas would be captured or killed before they could unleash a series of reprisals. Just as well that his two boys, Ramfis and Radhamés, were in Paris. How many people had Antonio de la Maza talked to? At times, in the endless meetings of the past few months to revise the plan, Antonio had let slip allusions, references, half-spoken words that suggested there were many people involved. Tony had taken caution to the extreme of cutting Salvador off one day when he began to say in indignation that he and Antonio de la Maza, at a meeting in the house of General Juan Tomás Díaz, had argued with a group of conspirators who objected to bringing Imbert into the plot. They didn’t think he was safe because of his Trujillista past; somebody recalled the famous telegram to Trujillo, offering to burn Puerto Plata. (“It will follow me to my death and beyond,” he thought.) Turk and Antonio had protested, saying they would put their hands to the fire for Tony, but he would not allow Salvador to continue:

“I don’t want to know, Turk. After all, why would people who don’t know me ever trust me? They’re right, I’ve worked my whole life for Trujillo, directly or indirectly.”

“And what do I do?” replied Turk. “What do thirty or forty percent of Dominicans do? Aren’t we all working for the government or its businesses? Only the very rich can allow themselves the luxury of not working for Trujillo.”

“Not them either,” he thought. The rich too, if they wanted to go on being rich, had to ally themselves with the Chief, sell him part of their businesses or buy part of his, and contribute in this way to his greatness and power. With half-closed eyes, lulled by the gentle sound of the sea, he thought of what a perverse system Trujillo created, one in which all Dominicans sooner or later took part as accomplices, a system which only exiles (not always) and the dead could escape. In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. “The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,” he had once heard Agustín Cabral say (“A very intelligent and competent Dominican,” he told himself) and the words had been etched in his mind: “Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.” He was proof of this truth. It never occurred to him to put up the slightest resistance to his appointments. As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will.

In contrast to Turk, religion had never occupied a central place in the life of Antonio Imbert. He was Catholic in the Dominican way, he had gone through all the religious ceremonies that marked people’s lives—baptism, confirmation, first communion, Catholic school, marriage in the Church—and he undoubtedly would be buried with the sermon and blessing of a priest. But he had never been a particularly conscientious believer, never been concerned with the implications of his faith in everyday life, never bothered to verify if his behavior complied with the commandments, as Salvador did in a way that he found debilitating.

But what he said about free will affected him. Perhaps this was why he decided that Trujillo had to die. So that he and other Dominicans could recover their ability to at least accept or reject the work they did to earn a living. Tony did not know what that was like. Perhaps as a child he knew, but he had forgotten. It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans thirty-one years ago: free will.

At the sound of the bell, Urania and her father become rigid, looking at each other as if caught in some mischief. Voices on the ground floor and an exclamation of surprise. Hurried steps coming up the stairs. The door opens almost at the same time that they hear an impatient knock, and a bewildered face peers in; Urania immediately recognizes her cousin Lucinda.

“Urania? Urania?” Her large protruding eyes examine her from top to bottom, from bottom to top, then she opens her arms and walks toward her as if to verify whether or not she is a hallucination.

“It’s me, Lucindita.” Urania embraces the younger daughter of her Aunt Adelina, the cousin who is her own age, her classmate at school.

“Uranita! I can’t believe it! You’re here? Let me take a look at you! What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you come to the house? Have you forgotten how much we love you? Don’t you remember your Aunt Adelina, and Manolita? And me, you ungrateful thing?”

She is so surprised, so full of questions, so curious—“My God, girl, how could you spend thirty-five years—thirty-five, right?—without coming home and seeing your family? Oh, Uranita! You must have so much to tell us!”—that she doesn’t give her time to answer her questions. That’s one way she hasn’t changed much. Even as a little girl she chattered like a parrot, Lucindita the enthusiastic one, the inventive and playful one. The cousin she always liked best. Urania remembers her in her dress uniform, white skirt and navy-blue jacket, and in the everyday pink-and-blue outfit: an agile, plump little girl in bangs, with braces on her teeth and a smile on her lips. Now she is a stout matron, her face taut and smooth with no sign of a facelift, wearing a simple flowered dress. Her only adornment is a pair of long, flashing gold earings. Suddenly she interrupts her affectionate questioning of Urania, goes over to the invalid, and kisses him on the forehead.

“What a nice surprise your daughter gave you, Uncle Agustín. You didn’t expect your little girl to come back to life and pay you a visit. It’s a happy time, isn’t it, Uncle Agustín?”

She kisses him again on the forehead and just as abruptly forgets about him. She sits next to Urania on the edge of the bed. She takes her by the arm, looks at her, examines her, overwhelms her again with exclamations and questions:

“You look so good, girl. We’re the same age, right? And you look ten years younger. It’s not fair! It must be because you never married and had children. Nothing like a husband and kids to ruin your looks. What a figure, what skin! You look like a kid, Urania!”

She begins to recognize in her cousin’s voice the nuances, the accents, the music of the little girl she played with so often in the courtyards of Santo Domingo Academy, and to whom she so often had to explain geometry and trigonometry.

“A whole lifetime of not seeing each other, Lucindita, of not knowing anything about each other,” she exclaims at last.

“It’s your fault, you ungrateful thing.” Her cousin lectures her with affection, but now her eyes blaze with the question, the questions, that uncles, aunts, and cousins must have asked one another so often in the early years, after the sudden departure of Uranita Cabral, at the end of May 1961, for the distant town of Adrian, Michigan, where Siena Heights Preparatory School and College had been established by the same order of Dominican nuns that administered Santo Domingo Academy in Ciudad Trujillo. “I never understood it, Uranita. You and I were such good friends besides being cousins, we were so close. What happened to make you suddenly turn away from us? From your papa, your aunts and uncles, your cousins. Even from me. I wrote twenty or thirty letters and not a word from you. For years I sent you postcards, birthday cards, and so did Manolita and my mama. What did we ever do to you? What made you so angry that for thirty-five years you never wrote, never even set foot in your own country?”

“The foolishness of youth, Lucindita.” Urania laughs and takes her hand. “But now, as you can see, I’m over it, and here I am.”

“Are you sure you’re not a ghost?” Her cousin pulls back to look at her, and shakes her head in disbelief. “Why come like this, not letting anybody know? We would have met you at the airport.”

“I wanted to surprise you,” Urania lies. “It was a last-minute decision. An impulse. I threw a couple of things in a suitcase and caught a plane.”

“In the family, we were sure you’d never come back again.” Lucinda becomes serious. “Uncle Agustín too. I have to tell you, he suffered a lot. Because you didn’t want to talk to him, wouldn’t answer him on the phone. He was desperate, he used to cry about it to my mama. He never got over your treating him like that. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t want to interfere in your life, Urania. It’s because we were always so close. Tell me about yourself. You live in New York, right? I know things are going well for you. We’ve followed your career, you’re a legend in the family. You work in a very important office, don’t you?”

“Well, there are bigger law firms than ours.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve been so successful in the United States,” Lucinda exclaims, and Urania detects an acid note in her cousin’s voice. “Everybody saw it coming from the time you were a little girl, you were so intelligent and studious. Mother Superior said so, and Sister Helen Claire, Sister Francis, Sister Susana, and especially Sister Mary, you were always her pet: Uranita Cabral, an Einstein in skirts.”

Urania bursts out laughing. Not so much because of what her cousin says as for the way she says it: with eloquence and humor, talking with her mouth, eyes, hands, her whole body, all at the same time and with the effusive high spirits typical of Dominican speech. Something she learned about, by way of contrast, thirty-five years earlier, when she came to Adrian, Michigan, and suddenly found herself surrounded by people who spoke only English.

“When you left and didn’t even say goodbye to me, I was so sad I almost died,” her cousin says, sorrowful about those long-ago times. “Nobody in the family understood anything. But what does this mean? Uranita goes to the United States and doesn’t even say goodbye! We pestered Uncle Agustín with questions, but he seemed to be in the dark too. ‘The nuns offered her a scholarship, it was too good an opportunity to miss.’ Nobody believed him.”

“That’s how it was, Lucindita.” Urania looks at her father, who once again is motionless and attentive, listening to them. “There was a chance to study in Michigan, and not being a fool, I took it.”

“That part I understand,” her cousin reiterates, “and I know you deserved a scholarship. But why leave as if you were running away? Why break with your family, your father, your country?”

“I was always a little crazy, Lucindita. And really, even though I didn’t write, I thought about all of you a lot. Especially you.”

A lie. You didn’t miss anyone, not even Lucinda, your cousin and classmate, your confidante and accomplice in mischief. You wanted to forget her too, and Manolita, Aunt Adelina, and your father, this city and this country, during those early months in faraway Adrian, on that beautiful campus of neat gardens with their begonias, tulips, magnolia trees, borders of rosebushes, and tall pines whose resinous scent drifted into the room you shared during your first year with four roommates, among them Alina, the black girl from Georgia, your first friend in that new world so different from the one where you had spent your first fourteen years. Did the Dominican nuns at Adrian know why you had left as if you were “running away”? Did they find out from Sister Mary, the director of studies at Santo Domingo? They had to know. If Sister Mary hadn’t given them some background, they wouldn’t have given you the scholarship so quickly. The sisters were models of discretion, because in the two years Urania spent at Siena Heights Prep and the four years following at Siena Heights College, none of them ever made the slightest allusion to the story that tore at your memory. As for the rest, they never repented of having been so generous: you were the first graduate of that school to be accepted at Harvard and earn a degree with honors from the most prestigious university in the world. Adrian, Michigan! You haven’t been back in so many years. It must have changed from the provincial town of farmers who went into their houses at sunset and left the streets empty, families whose horizons ended at neighboring towns that seemed like twins—Clinton and Chelsea—and whose greatest diversion was attending the famous barbecued chicken festival in Manchester. A clean city, Adrian, and pretty, especially in winter when the snow hid the straight, narrow streets where people could ice-skate and ski, under white puffs of cotton that children made into snowmen and that you, entranced, watched falling from the sky, and where you would have died of bitterness, and perhaps of boredom, if you hadn’t devoted yourself so furiously to studying.

Her cousin has not stopped talking.

“And a little while after that they killed Trujillo, and the calamities began. Do you know the
caliés
went into the academy? They beat the sisters, Sister Helen Claire’s face was covered with cuts and bruises, and they killed Badulaque, the German shepherd. They almost burned down our house because we were related to your papa. They said that Uncle Agustín sent you to the United States because he guessed what was going to happen.”

“Well, he wanted to get me away from here,” Urania interrupts. “Even though he had fallen into disgrace, he knew the anti-Trujillistas would settle accounts with him.”

“I understand that too,” Lucinda murmurs. “But not your refusing to have anything more to do with us.”

“And since you always had a good heart, I’ll bet you’re not still angry with me,” Urania says with a laugh. “Right, Lucindita?”

“Of course not,” her cousin agrees. “If you knew how much I begged my papa to send me to the United States. To be with you, at Siena Heights. I had persuaded him, I think, when the disaster came. Everybody began attacking us, telling horrible lies about the family just because my mother was the sister of a Trujillista. Nobody remembered that at the end Trujillo treated your papa like a dog. You were lucky not to be here during those months, Uranita. We were scared to death. I don’t know how Uncle Agustín stopped them from burning his house. But sometimes they threw stones at him.”

She is interrupted by a timid knock at the door.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” the nurse says, pointing at the invalid. “But it’s time.”

Urania looks at her, not understanding.

“To do his business,” Lucinda explains, glancing at the chamber pot. “He’s as regular as a clock. He’s so lucky: I have problems with my stomach and live on prunes. Nerves, they say. Well, let’s go to the living room.”

As they walk down the stairs, the memory returns to Urania of her months and years in Adrian, the austere library with stained-glass windows, beside the chapel and adjacent to the refectory, where she spent most of her time when she wasn’t in classes and seminars. Studying, reading, scrawling in notebooks, writing essays, summarizing books, in the methodical, intense, absorbed way that her teachers valued so highly and that filled some classmates with admiration and infuriated others. It wasn’t a desire to learn and succeed that kept you in the library but the yearning to become distracted, intoxicated, lost in those subjects—sciences or literature, it was all the same—so you wouldn’t think, so you could drive away your Dominican memories.

“But you’re wearing gym clothes,” Lucinda observes when they’re in the living room, near the window that faces the garden. “Don’t tell me you’ve done aerobics this morning.”

“I went for a run on the Malecón. And on my way back to the hotel, my feet brought me here, dressed in these clothes. I arrived a couple of days ago, and wasn’t sure if I’d come to see him or not. If it would be too much of a shock for him. But he hasn’t even recognized me.”

“Of course he recognized you.” Her cousin crosses her legs and takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her purse. “He can’t talk, but he knows who comes in, and he understands everything. Manolita and I see him almost every day. My mama can’t, not since she broke her hip. If we miss one day, he puts on a long face the next time.”

She sits looking at Urania in a way that makes her predict: “Another string of reproaches.” Doesn’t it make you sad that your father is spending his final years alone, in the hands of a nurse, visited only by two nieces? Isn’t it your job to be with him and give him affection? Do you think that giving him a pension means you’ve done your duty? It’s all in Lucinda’s bulging eyes. But she doesn’t dare say it. She offers Urania a cigarette, and when her cousin refuses, she exclaims:

“You don’t smoke, of course. I thought you wouldn’t, living in the United States. They’re psychotic about tobacco up there.”

“Yes, really psychotic,” Urania admits. “They’ve banned smoking in the office. It doesn’t matter to me, I never smoked.”

“The perfect girl,” Lucindita says with a laugh. “Listen, darling, you can tell me, did you ever have any vices? Did you ever do any of those crazy things everybody else does?”

“Some.” Urania laughs. “But I can’t tell you about them.”

As she talks to her cousin, she examines the living room. The furniture is the same, its shabbiness shows that; the armchair has a broken leg and a wedge of wood props it up; the frayed upholstery is torn and has lost its color, which, Urania recalls, was a pale brownish red. Worse than the furniture are the walls: damp spots everywhere, and in many places parts of the outside wall are visible. The curtains have disappeared, though the wooden rods and rings where they hung are still there.

“You’re upset by how bad your house looks.” Her cousin exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Ours is the same, Urania. The family was ruined when Trujillo died, that’s the truth. They threw my papa out of the Tobacco Company and he never found another job. Because he was your father’s brother-in-law, just because of that. Well, Uncle Agustín had it even worse. They investigated him, made all kinds of accusations, brought lawsuits against him. Even though he had fallen into disgrace with Trujillo. They couldn’t prove anything, but his life was ruined too. It’s lucky you’re doing well and can help him. Nobody in the family could. We were all flat broke, on our uppers. Poor Uncle Agustín! He wasn’t like so many others who made accommodations. He was a decent, honest man, and that’s why he was ruined.”