The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Johnny Abbes was in uniform. Though he made an effort to wear it with the correctness Trujillo demanded, he could not do more than his flaccid, misshapen physique allowed. Fairly short, with a protruding belly that complemented his dewlaps, and a prominent chin divided by a deep cleft. His cheeks were flabby too. Only his cruel, shifting eyes revealed the intelligence behind the physical calamity. He was thirty-five or thirty-six years old but looked like an old man. He hadn’t gone to West Point or to any military academy; he wouldn’t have been admitted, for he lacked a soldier’s physique and a military vocation. He was what Gittleman, the Benefactor’s instructor when he was a Marine, would have called “a toad in body and soul”: no muscles, too much fat, and an excessive fondness for intrigue. Trujillo made him a colonel overnight when, in one of those inspirations that marked his political career, he decided to name him head of the SIM to replace Razor. Why did he do it? Not because Abbes was cruel but because he was cold: the iciest individual Trujillo had ever known in this country of hot bodies and souls. Was it a fortunate decision? Recently the colonel had made errors. The failed attempt on the life of President Betancourt was not the only one; he had also been wrong about the supposed uprising against Fidel Castro by Commanders Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and William Morgan, which had turned out to be a trick by the Beard to draw Cuban exiles to the island and capture them. The Benefactor was thoughtful as he turned the pages of the report and sipped his coffee.
“You insist on pulling Bishop Reilly out of Santo Domingo Academy,” he murmured. “Sit down, have some coffee.”
“If you’ll permit me, Excellency?”
The colonel’s melodious voice dated from his youth, when he had been a radio announcer commenting on baseball, basketball, and horse races. From that period, he had kept only his fondness for esoteric reading—he admitted he was a Rosicrucian—the handkerchiefs he dyed red because, he said, it was a lucky color for an Aries, and his ability to see each person’s aura (all of it bullshit that made the Generalissimo laugh). He settled himself in front of the Chief’s desk, holding a cup of coffee in his hand. It was still dark outside, and the office was half in shadow, barely lit by a small lamp that enclosed Trujillo’s hands in a golden circle.
“That abscess must be lanced, Excellency. Our biggest problem isn’t Kennedy, he’s too busy with the failure of his Cuban invasion. It’s the Church. If we don’t put an end to the fifth columnists here, we’ll have problems. Reilly serves the purposes of those who demand an invasion. Every day they make him more important, while they pressure the White House to send in the Marines to help the poor, persecuted bishop. Don’t forget, Kennedy’s a Catholic.”
“We’re all Catholics,” Trujillo said with a sigh. And demolished the colonel’s argument: “That’s a reason not to touch him. It would give the gringos the excuse they’re looking for.”
Though there were times when the colonel’s frankness displeased Trujillo, he tolerated it. The head of the SIM had orders to speak to him with absolute sincerity even when it might offend his ears. Razor didn’t dare use that prerogative in the way Johnny Abbes did.
“I don’t think we can go back to our old relationship with the Church, that thirty-year idyll is over,” Abbes said slowly, his eyes like quicksilver in their sockets, as if searching the area for ambushes. “They declared war on us on January 24, 1960, with their Bishops’ Pastoral Letter, and their goal is to destroy the regime. A few concessions won’t satisfy the priests. They won’t support you again, Excellency. The Church wants war, just like the Yankees. And in war there are only two options: surrender to the enemy or defeat him. Bishops Panal and Reilly are in open rebellion.”
Colonel Abbes had two plans. One, to use the paleros—thugs armed with clubs and knives led by Balá, an ex-convict in his service—as a shield while the caliés rioted, pretending to be recalcitrant groups that had broken away from large protest demonstrations against the terrorist bishops in La Vega and at Santo Domingo Academy, and killed the prelates before the police could rescue them. This formula was risky; it might provoke an invasion. The advantage was that the death of the two bishops would paralyze the rest of the clergy for a long time to come. In the other plan, the police rescued Panal and Reilly before they could be lynched by a mob, and the government deported them to Spain and the United States, arguing that this was the only way to guarantee their safety. Congress would pass a law establishing that all priests who exercised their ministry in the country had to be Dominicans by birth. Foreigners or naturalized citizens would be returned to their own countries. In this way—the colonel consulted a notebook—the Catholic clergy would be reduced by a third. The minority of native-born priests would be manageable.
He stopped speaking when the Benefactor, whose head had been lowered, looked up.
“That’s what Fidel Castro did in Cuba.”
Johnny Abbes nodded:
“There the Church started out with protests too, and ended up conspiring to prepare the way for the Yankees. Castro threw out the foreign priests and took drastic measures against the ones who were left. What happened to him? Nothing.”
“So far” the Benefactor corrected him. “Kennedy will send the Marines to Cuba any day now. And this time it won’t be the kind of mess they made last month at the Bay of Pigs.”
“In that case, the Beard will the fighting,” Johnny Abbes agreed. “And it isn’t impossible that the Marines will land here. And you’ve decided that we’ll the fighting too.”
Trujillo gave a mocking little laugh. If they had to die fighting the Marines, how many Dominicans would sacrifice themselves with him? The soldiers would, no doubt about that. They proved it during the invasion sent by Fidel on June 14, 1959. They fought well, they wiped out the invaders in just a few days, in the mountains of Costanza, on the beaches of Maimón and Estero Hondo. But the Marines…
“I won’t have many with me, I’m afraid. The rats running away will raise a dust storm. But you won’t have a choice, you’ll have to the with me. Wherever you go you’ll face jail, or assassination by the enemies you have all over the world.”
“I’ve made them defending the regime, Excellency.”
“Of all the men around me, the only one who couldn’t betray me, even if he wanted to, is you,” an amused Trujillo insisted. “I’m the only person you can get close to, the only one who doesn’t hate you or dream about killing you. We’re married till death do us part.”
He laughed again, in a good humor, examining the colonel the way an entomologist examines an insect difficult to classify. They said a lot of things about Abbes, especially about his cruelty. It was an advantage for somebody in his position. They said, for example, that his father, an American of German descent, found little Johnny, still in short pants, sticking pins into the eyes of chicks in the henhouse. That as a young man he sold medical students cadavers he had robbed from graves in Independencia Cemetery. That though he was married to Lupita, a hideous Mexican, hard as nails, who carried a pistol in her handbag, he was a faggot. Even that he had gone to bed with Kid Trujillo, the Generalissimo’s half brother.
“You’ve heard what they say about you,” he said, looking him in the eye and laughing. “Some of it must be true. Did you like poking out chickens’ eyes when you were a kid? Did you rob the graves at Independencia Cemetery and sell the corpses?”
The colonel barely smiled.
“The first probably isn’t true, I don’t remember doing it. The second is only half true. They weren’t cadavers, Excellency. Bones and skulls washed up to the surface by the rain. To earn a few pesos. Now they say that as head of the SIM, I’m returning the bones.”
“And what about you being a faggot?”
The colonel didn’t become upset this time either. His voice maintained a clinical indifference.
“I’ve never gone in for that, Excellency. I’ve never gone to bed with a man.”
“Okay, enough bullshit,” he cut him off, becoming serious. “Don’t touch the bishops, for
Would the two bishops get their way and be as smug as that black bastard Betancourt? Again he felt his anger rise. That rat in Caracas had gotten the OAS to sanction the Dominican Republic and pressured the member countries to break off relations and apply economic pressures that were strangling the nation. Each day, each hour, they were damaging what had been a brilliant economy. And Betancourt was still alive, the standard-bearer of freedom, displaying his burned hands on television, proud of having survived a stupid attempt that never should have been left to those assholes in the Venezuelan military. Next time the SIM would run everything. In his technical, impersonal way, Abbes explained the new operation that would culminate in the powerful explosion, set off by remote control, of a device purchased for a king’s ransom in Czechoslovakia and stored now at the Dominican consulate in Haiti. It would be easy to take it from there to Caracas at the opportune moment.
Ever since 1958, when he decided to promote him to the position he now held, the Benefactor had met every day with the colonel, in this office, at Mahogany House, wherever he might be, and always at this time of day. Like the Generalissimo, Johnny Abbes never took a vacation. Trujillo first heard about him from General Espaillat. The former head of the Intelligence Service had surprised him with a precise, detailed report on Dominican exiles in Mexico City: what they were doing, what they were plotting, where they lived, where they met, who was helping them, which diplomats they visited.
“How many people do you have in Mexico to be so well informed about those bastards?”
“All the information comes from one person, Excellency.” Razor gestured with professional satisfaction. “He’s very young. Johnny Abbes García. Perhaps you’ve met his father, a half-German gringo who came here to work for the electric company and married a Dominican. The boy was a sports reporter and something of a poet. I began to use him as an informant on people in radio and the press, and at the Gómez Pharmacy gatherings that the intellectuals attend. He did so well I sent him to Mexico City on a phony scholarship. And now, as you can see, he’s gained the confidence of the entire exile community. He gets on well with everybody. I don’t know how he does it, Excellency, but in Mexico he even got close to Lombardo Toledano, the leftist union leader. Imagine, the ugly broad he married was secretary to that Red.”
Poor Razor! By talking so enthusiastically, he began to lose the directorship of the Intelligence Service that he had trained for at West Point.
“Bring him here, give him a job where I can watch him,” Trujillo ordered.
That was how the awkward, unprepossessing figure with the perpetually darting eyes had appeared in the corridors of the National Palace. He occupied a low-level position in the Office of Information. Trujillo studied him at a distance. From the time he had been very young, in San Cristóbal, he had followed those intuitions which, after a simple glance, a brief chat, a mere allusion, made him certain a person could be useful to him. That was how he chose many of his collaborators, and he hadn’t done too badly. For several weeks Johnny Abbes García worked in an obscure office, under the direction of the poet Ramón Emilio Jiménez, along with Dipp Velarde Font, Querol, and Grimaldi, writing supposed letters from readers to “The Public Forum” in the paper El Caribe. Before putting him to the test, he waited for a sign, not knowing exactly what form it would take. It came in the most unexpected way, on the day he saw Johnny Abbes in a Palace corridor conversing with one of his ministers. What did the meticulous, pious, austere Joaquín Balaguer have to talk about with Razor’s informant?
“Nothing in particular, Excellency,” Balaguer explained when it was time for his ministerial meeting. “I did not know the young man. When I saw him so absorbed in his reading, for he was reading as he walked, my curiosity was piqued. You know how much I love books. I could not have been more astonished. He cannot be in his right mind. Do you know what he was enjoying so much? A book about Chinese tortures, with photographs of those who had been decapitated and skinned alive.”
That night he sent for him. Abbes seemed so overwhelmed—with joy, fear, or both—by the unexpected honor that he could hardly get the words out when he greeted the Benefactor.
“You did good work in Mexico,” he said in the sharp, high-pitched voice that, like his gaze, had a paralyzing effect on his interlocutors. “Espaillat told me about it. I think you can take on more serious tasks. Are you interested?”
“Anything Your Excellency desires.” He stood motionless, his feet together, like a student in front of his teacher.
“Did you know José Almoina in Mexico? A Galician who came here with the Republican exiles from Spain.”
“Yes, Excellency. I mean, only by sight. But I did know many people in the group he meets with in the Café Comercio. They call themselves ‘Dominican Spaniards.’”
“This individual published a book attacking me, A Satrapy in the Caribbean, that was paid for by the Guatemalan government. He used an alias, Gregorio Bustamante. Then, to throw us off the track, he had the gall to publish another book in Argentina, I Was Trujillo’s Secretary, and this time he used his own name and praised me to the skies. That was several years ago, and he feels safe there in Mexico. He thinks I’ve forgotten that he defamed my family and the regime that fed him. There’s no statute of limitations on crimes like that. Do you want to take care of it?”
“It would be a great honor, Excellency,” Abbes García responded immediately, with a confidence he had not shown until that moment.
Some time later, the Generalissimo’s former secretary, private tutor to Ramfis, and hack writer for Doña María Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady, died in the Mexican capital in a rain of bullets. There was the obligatory outcry from the exiles and the press, but no one could prove, as they claimed, that the assassination had been the work of “the long arm of Trujillo.” A fast, impeccable operation that cost less than fifteen hundred dollars, according to the bill submitted by Johnny Abbes García on his return from Mexico. The Benefactor inducted him into the Army with the rank of colonel.
The elimination of José Almoina was just one in the long series of brilliant operations carried out by the colonel, killing or maiming or severely wounding dozens of the most outspoken exiles in Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, New York, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Lightningquick, clean pieces of work that impressed the Benefactor. Each one a small masterpiece in its skill and secrecy, the work of a watchmaker. Most of the time, in addition to killing off enemies, Abbes García arranged to ruin their reputations. The unionist Roberto Lamada, a refugee in Havana, died of a beating he received in a brothel in the Barrio Chino at the hands of hoodlums who filed a complaint against him with the police, charging him with attempting to stab a prostitute who refused to submit to the sadomasochistic perversions the exile had demanded; the woman, a tearful mulatta with dyed red hair, appeared in Carteles and Bohemia, displaying the wounds the degenerate had inflicted on her. The lawyer Bayardo Cipriota perished in Caracas in a homosexual dispute: he was found stabbed to death in a cheap hotel, wearing panties and a bra, with lipstick on his mouth. The forensic examination determined that he had sperm in his rectum. How did Colonel Abbes manage to establish contact so rapidly, in cities he barely knew, with denizens of the underworld, the gangsters, killers, traffickers, thugs, prostitutes, pimps, and pickpockets, who were always involved in the scandals, the delight of the sensationalist press, in which the regime’s enemies found themselves embroiled? How did he set up so efficient a network of informants and thugs throughout most of Latin America and the United States and spend so little money? Trujillo’s time was too valuable to be wasted checking into details. But from a distance he admired, like a connoisseur with a precious jewel, the subtlety and originality with which Johnny Abbes García rid the regime of its enemies. Exile groups an
Trujillo pointed at the report on his desk with a contemptuous air:
“Another conspiracy to kill me led by Juan Tomás Díaz? And organized by Consul Henry Dearborn, the asshole from the CIA?”
Colonel Abbes García abandoned his immobility long enough to shift his buttocks in the chair.
“That’s what it looks like, Excellency.” He nodded, not attributing too much importance to the matter.
“It’s funny,” Trujillo interrupted him. “They broke off relations with us, obeying the OAS resolution. And called home their diplomats but left us Henry Dearborn and his agents so they could keep on cooking up plots. Are you sure Juan Tomás is part of it?”