The Feast of the Goat (16 page)

On some pretext or other he sent his wife, Guarina, and his daughter, Leslie, who knew nothing of his activities, to the farm of some relatives in La Romana, and with a glass of rum in his hand, he sat down to wait. He had a loaded revolver, with the safety off, in his pocket. But the
caliés
did not come that day, or the next, or the one after that, to his house, or to his office at Ready-Mix, where he continued to show up punctually with all the sangfroid he could muster. Luis and Iván had not betrayed him, and neither had the people he knew in the clandestine groups. Miraculously, he escaped a repression that struck at the guilty and the innocent, filled the prisons, and for the first time in the twenty-nine years of the regime, terrorized the families of the middle class, Trujillo’s traditional mainstays and the source of most of the prisoners, members of what was called, in response to the frustrated invasion, the June 14 Movement. Tony’s cousin Ramón (Moncho) Imbert Rainieri was one of its leaders.

Why did he escape? Because of the courage of Luis and Iván, no doubt—two years later they were still in the dungeons of La Victoria—and the courage, no doubt, of other girls and boys in June 14 who forgot to name him. Perhaps they considered him merely an onlooker, not an activist. Tony Imbert was so shy that he rarely opened his mouth at the meetings Moncho took him to for the first time; he would only listen, or offer a monosyllabic opinion. And it was unlikely he was in the files of the SIM except as the brother of Major Segundo Imbert. His service record was clean. He had spent his life working for the regime—as an inspector general on the railroad, governor of Puerto Plata, general supervisor of the National Lottery, director of the office that issued identity papers—and as manager at Ready-Mix, a factory that belonged to Trujillo’s son-in-law. Why would they suspect him?

Very cautiously, in the days following June 14, he stayed at the factory at night, dismantled the sticks of dynamite and returned them to the quarries, while he pondered how and with whom he would carry out the next plan to do away with Trujillo. He confessed everything that had happened (and failed to happen) to his dearest friend, Salvador (Turk) Estrella Sadhalá, who berated Tony for not including him in the Máximo Gómez plot. Salvador had reached the same conclusion on his own: nothing would change as long as Trujillo was alive. They began to propose and discard possible methods of attack, but said nothing in front of Amadito, the third man in their trio: it was hard to believe that a military adjutant would want to kill the Benefactor.

Not long afterward, the traumatic episode in Amadito’s career occurred—in order to obtain his promotion, he had to kill a prisoner (his ex-fiancée’s brother, he believed)—that brought him into the game. It would soon be two years since the landings at Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo. One year, eleven months, and fourteen days, to be exact. Antonio Imbert looked at his watch. He probably wasn’t coming.

So many things had happened in the Dominican Republic, in the world, and in his personal life. So many. The massive dragnets of January 1960, into which so many boys and girls of the June 14 Movement fell, among them the Mirabal sisters and their husbands. Trujillo’s break with his old accomplice, the Catholic Church, after the Pastoral Letter of January 1960, in which the bishops denounced the dictatorship. The attempt against President Betancourt of Venezuela, in June 1960, that mobilized so many countries against Trujillo, including his great ally the United States, which voted in favor of sanctions on August 6, 1960, at the conference in Costa Rica. And, on November 25, 1960—Imbert felt the inevitable piercing in his chest every time he recalled that dismal day—the murder of the three sisters, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal, and their driver, in La Cumbre, in the northern mountain range, on their way home from visiting Minerva’s and Maria Teresa’s husbands, imprisoned in the Fortress of Puerto Plata.

The entire Dominican Republic learned about the killing in the rapid, mysterious way that news circulated from mouth to mouth and house to house and in a few hours reached the most remote corners of the country, though not a line appeared in the press, and often, as it circulated, the news transmitted by human tom-tom was colored, diminished, exaggerated until it turned into myth, legend, fiction, with almost no connection to real events. He recalled that night on the Malecón, not very far from where he was now, six months later, waiting for the Goat—to avenge the Mirabal sisters too. They were sitting on the stone railing, as they did every night—he, Salvador, Amadito, and, on this occasion, Antonio de la Maza—to enjoy the cool breeze and to talk, away from prying ears. What had happened to the Mirabal sisters set their teeth on edge, it turned their stomachs as they discussed the deaths of the three incredible women, high in the mountains, in an alleged car accident.

“They kill our fathers, our brothers, our friends. And now they’re killing our women. And here we sit, resigned, waiting our turn,” he heard himself say.

“Not resigned, Tony,” Antonio de la Maza objected. He had come from Restauración, and had brought the news of the death of the Mirabal sisters, which he had heard along the way. “Trujillo will pay. A plan’s in motion. But it has to be done right.”

At that time, an attempt was being planned in Moca, during a visit by Trujillo to the land of the De la Maza family, on one of the trips through the country that he had been making since the condemnation by the OAS and the imposition of economic sanctions. A bomb would go off in the main church, consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and a rain of rifle fire would fall on Trujillo from the balconies, terraces, and clock tower as he spoke on the platform erected in the atrium to a crowd gathered around the statue of St. John Bosco, partially covered by heartsease. Imbert himself inspected the church and volunteered to hide in the clock tower, the most dangerous place in the church.

“Tony knew the Mirabals,” Turk explained to Antonio. “That’s why he’s so upset.”

He knew them, though he couldn’t say they were friends. He had occasionally met the three sisters, and Minerva’s and Patria’s husbands, Manolo Tavares Justo and Leandro Guzmán, at the meetings at which the June 14 Movement was organized, taking the historic Trinitaria de Duarte as their model. The three women were leaders of the small, enthusiastic, but disorganized and inefficient organization that the repression was destroying. They had made an impression on him because of the conviction and boldness they brought to an unequal and uncertain struggle, Minerva Mirabal in particular. It happened to everyone who met her and heard her give opinions, hold discussions, offer proposals, or make decisions. Though he hadn’t thought about it earlier, after the killing Tony Imbert told himself that until he knew Minerva Mirabal, it had never occurred to him that’ a woman could dedicate herself to things as manly as planning a revolution, obtaining and hiding weapons, dynamite, Molotov cocktails, knives, bayonets, talking about assassination attempts, strategy, and tactics, and dispassionately discussing whether, in the event they fell into the hands of the SIM, activists ought to swallow poison to avoid the risk of betraying their comrades under torture.

Minerva spoke about these things, and about the best way to engage in clandestine propaganda pr recruit university students, and everyone listened to her. Because of her intelligence and the clarity with which she spoke. Her firm convictions and eloquence gave her words a strength that was contagious. And she was beautiful as well, with black hair and eyes, delicate features, finely drawn nose and mouth, and dazzling white teeth that contrasted with the bluish cast of her skin. Very beautiful, yes. There was something powerfully feminine in her, a delicacy, a natural flirtatiousness in her movements and smiles, despite the somber clothing she wore to meetings. Tony did not recall ever seeing her in makeup. Yes, very beautiful, but—he thought—none of the men would ever have dared to pay her one of those compliments, say one of those playful, witty things that were normal, natural—obligatory—for Dominican men, especially if they were young, and united by the intense brotherhood created by shared ideals, illusions, and dangers. Something in Minerva Mirabal’s self-assured presence kept men from taking the informal liberties they allowed themselves with other women.

By then, she was already a legend in the small world of the clandestine struggle against Trujillo. Which of the things they said about her were true, which were exaggerated, which invented? No one would have presumed to ask her, no one wanted to receive that deep, scornful look or one of those cutting replies with which she sometimes silenced an opponent. They said that as a teenager she dared to rebuff Trujillo himself by refusing to dance with him, and for that reason her father was deposed as mayor of Ojo de Agua and sent to prison. Others suggested that it was more than a rebuff, that she had slapped him because while they were dancing he fondled her and said something obscene, a possibility that many rejected (“She wouldn’t be alive, he would have killed her or had her killed on the spot”), but not Antonio Imbert. From the first time he saw and heard her, he did not doubt for a second that if the slap wasn’t the truth, it could have been. It was enough to see and hear Minerva Mirabal for only a few minutes (talking, for example, with icy naturalness about the need to prepare activists psychologically to resist torture) to know she was capable of slapping even Trujillo if he showed a lack of respect. She had been arrested several times, and stories were told about her fearlessness, first in La Cuarenta, and then in La Victoria, where she went on a hunger strike, withstood solitary confinement on bread and worm-infested water, and where, they said, she was savagely mistreated. She never spoke of her time in prison, or about the torture, or about the calvary her family had lived since it was known she was an anti-Trujillista: they had been hounded, had their few goods confiscated, and been placed under house arrest. The dictatorship allowed Minerva to study the law so that when she finished—a well-planned vengeance—it could deny her a professional license—that is, condemn her to not working, to not earning a living, to feeling frustrated in the prime of her youth, having studied five years for nothing. But none of that made her bitter; she went on tirelessly, encouraging everyone, an engine that would not stop, a prelude—Imbert often told himself—to the young, beautiful, enthusiastic, idealistic country the Dominican Republic would be one day.

He was embarrassed as he felt his eyes filling with tears. He lit a cigarette and took several drags, blowing the smoke toward the ocean, where moonlight glimmered and played. There was no breeze now. Occasionally, the headlights of a car appeared in the distance, coming from Ciudad Trujillo. The four would sit up straight, crane their necks, tensely scrutinize the darkness, but each time, when the car was twenty or thirty meters away, they discovered it wasn’t the Chevrolet and slumped back in their seats, disappointed.

The one who controlled his emotions best was Imbert. He had always been quiet, but in recent years, since the idea of killing Trujillo had taken possession of him and, like a hermit crab, fed on all his energy, his silence had intensified. He had never had many friends; in the last few months, his life had been bounded by his office at Ready-Mix, his home, and his daily meetings with Estrella Sadhalá and Lieutenant García Guerrero. Following the death of the Mirabal sisters, clandestine meetings had practically ceased. The repression crushed the June 14 Movement. Those who escaped withdrew into family life, trying to go unnoticed. From time to time a question would torment him: “Why wasn’t I arrested?” Uncertainty made him feel ill, as if he were guilty of something, as if he were responsible for how much others had suffered at the hands of Johnny Abbes while he continued to enjoy his freedom.

A very relative freedom, it’s true. When he understood the kind of regime he was living under, the kind of government he had served since he was a young man, and was still serving—what else was he doing as manager at one of the clan’s factories?—he felt like a prisoner. Perhaps it was to rid himself of the feeling that all his steps were controlled, every path he took and all his movements tracked, that the idea of eliminating Trujillo took hold so firmly in his consciousness. His disenchantment with the regime was gradual, long, and secret, beginning much earlier than the political difficulties of his brother Segundo, who had been even more of a Trujillista than he. Who around him had not been a Trujillista for the past twenty, twenty-five years? They all thought the Goat was the savior of the Nation, the man who ended the caudillo wars, did away with the threat of a new invasion from Haiti, called a halt to a humiliating dependency on the United States—which controlled customs, prohibited a Dominican currency, and approved the budget—and, whether they were willing or not, brought the country’s best minds into the government. Compared to that, what did it matter if Trujillo fucked any woman he wanted? Or swallowed up factories, farms, and livestock? Wasn’t he increasing Dominican prosperity? Hadn’t he given this country the most powerful Armed Forces in the Caribbean? For twenty years Tony Imbert had said and defended these things. That was what turned his stomach now.

He couldn’t remember how it began, the first doubts, conjectures, discrepancies that led him to wonder if everything really was going so well, or if, behind the facade of a country that under the severe but inspired leadership of an extraordinary statesman was moving ahead at a quickstep, lay a grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived, the enthronement, through propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie. Drops falling tirelessly, one after the other, boring a hole in his Trujillism. When he was no longer governor of Puerto Plata, deep in his heart he stopped being a Trujillista; he had become convinced the regime was dictatorial and corrupt. He told no one, not even Guarina. The face he showed the world was still Trujillista, and even though his brother Segundo had gone into exile in Puerto Rico, the regime, as a demonstration of its magnanimity, continued to give positions to Antonio, even—what greater proof of confidence?—in the Trujillo family enterprises.