COLONEL CASTILLO ARMAS OPENED HIS EYES, as he did every day, without need of an alarm, at exactly 5:30 in the morning. Even if he had gone to bed late—which he was forced to do often as president of the republic—his body was used to rising with the first light of the day, and had been since his cadet days at the Politécnica. To keep from waking Odilia, he tiptoed to the bathroom to shave and shower. When he saw his lean face in the mirror, with bags under his eyes, his pajamas sagging at the shoulders and waist, he realized he’d lost weight again. No wonder. With his headaches—a daily occurrence for three years now—and the imbeciles and traitors surrounding him, it was normal that he start to waste away. Eating had never been a passion of his; drinking was another matter. But lately food had begun to disgust him, and he’d had to force down a bit of fruit at breakfast or the tortilla with beans and chilies he had at midday whenever he wasn’t called to an official luncheon. At night he made himself eat one dish, at least, along with the two glasses of rum he drank to relax and forget the bitter taste of those days that had long been filling him with frustration and rage.
While he shaved and showered, he asked himself once more when everything around him had started to crumble. It wasn’t like this three years ago. Not at all. He remembered his arrival in Guatemala City from El Salvador after the peace negotiations with the armed forces, by the side of Ambassador John Peurifoy, that enormous gringo he had so mistrusted at first but who later behaved so admirably with him. The poor man had died in a collision, an assassination maybe, during his new posting as ambassador to Thailand, along with his son, who was riding in the car. May God have mercy on them both in heaven! He remembered the crowds who greeted him at La Aurora airport with hurrahs, applause, voices coming through loudspeakers. Like a king! That was how the civilians and soldiers had received him, friends and enemies, too, and the entire Guatemalan press. Right away, they had begun praising him, attending to his every wish, kissing his boots, begging for posts, ministries, promotions, contracts. Traitors! Rabble! Maybe it was on that very day, in the midst of his being welcomed, that things had started to go bad. Was that not the site of the first clash between the cadets from the Politécnica and the fleabag volunteers of the Army of Liberation? But there in the multitude, the incident passed unnoticed by many, himself included.
Three years later, everyone was conspiring against the government behind his back. He knew that very well. They wanted to eliminate him. Of course they did. Even his own director general of security, the Lug, a man he had entrusted with the country’s entire special forces, the police, the military, thinking he’d watch his back better than anyone. He was sure of it: Enrique was plotting against him, too. His brother, the defense minister Juan Francisco, had admitted it (I don’t know what the hell Enrique’s gotten into, you know he’s always been a loose cannon. The truth is, we barely see each other anymore). Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva was sharpening his knives, preparing to stab him in the back when the time came. But he wouldn’t let him. Better still, very soon he’d be crushing him like the cockroach he was. All he needed was someone trustworthy to put in his place. He’d make him choke on his treason, humiliate himself, fall on his knees begging forgiveness. And he would brook no excuses for betrayal. Not for any of them. He swore to God!
As he dressed, he remembered his duties for the day. The delegation of natives from Petén wouldn’t take long. At ten, he’d be meeting with the U.S. ambassador. He knew why: he’d be asking him for moderation and prudence. Some paradox! Now they want moderation and prudence, before it was an iron fist, doing away with all the real and imagined communists, the useful idiots and fellow travelers, the unionists and heads of the peasants’ leagues, the intellectual sellouts and the exiled artists, the militants and cooperativists, the terrorists, Freemasons, even the leaders of fraternal orders. And above all, no exit visas for the people hiding out in the embassies, starting with Árbenz, the Mute! To jail with them! And if there weren’t enough real communists, make up more, invent them to please those puritan know-nothings.
There was a ceremony at the Mexican Embassy, but he would only stay ten minutes, to read an address. Hopefully that text, by Mario Efraín Nájera Farfán, his consultant on judicial, diplomatic, and cultural questions, wouldn’t be riddled with incomprehensible jargon or anything too hard to pronounce. Then he would receive dispatches and reports until lunchtime. Would he go to Miss Guatemala’s house? Yes. He missed the serenity of mealtimes with Marta, just the two of them, chatting about anything, really, other than the present, and being able to nap for fifteen minutes afterward in the cozy wicker chair by the fan, gathering his strength before his afternoon and evening obligations began. Afterward, he would receive assorted ministers to take care of loose ends, plus the women’s delegation from Catholic Action sent by Mariano Rossell y Arellano, his former friend and collaborator, and his number-one enemy ever since he’d been with Marta. It would be the usual refrain: he would need to be on guard, because the evangelicals were penetrating too deeply into Guatemalan society, especially among the poor, unlettered Indians. He would let them jabber and complain for a quarter hour’s time, and then he would send them off with the appropriate reassurances: Guatemala will be closing its doors to the evangelicals, what were they thinking, they’re the last thing we need. At nightfall, he had a meeting at the National Palace with the most important businessmen in the country. At the same time, Odilia would be representing him at an assembly devoted to education. They needed urgently to convince better-off Guatemalans to invest more in their country, to bring home the money they had stashed away in the United States. He would also have to give one more speech written by Mario Efraín Nájera Farfán. Would he go sleep afterward at Miss Guatemala’s? It had been at least a week since he’d made love to her, he calculated. Or was it two? He no longer had a good head for remembering things, even the important ones. He might or might not do it tonight, it would depend on how tired he was, he decided.
When he was getting ready to leave, he heard his wife asking him, still groggy, if he would be home for lunch. Without stopping to wish her a good morning, he said no, he had official business to attend to. He walked out quickly, to avoid having to speak with Odilia. His relationship with his wife had been in crisis since he found out, a few weeks before, that she’d met with the military chiefs at their private casino without saying a word about it to him. When he questioned her about it, she turned nervous, hemmed and hawed, refused to admit it was true. Only when she heard him raise his voice did she confess: they’d invited her to discuss a delicate and urgent matter.
“So you think it’s fine for you to meet with military men conspiring behind my back?” he asked, even louder.
“There was no conspiracy,” Odilia said, holding her ground, her posture and stare defiant. “Those soldiers are your friends, they’re loyal to you and they’re worried about your situation.”
“What situation?” Castillo Armas said, feeling rage blind him, but trying to keep himself from smacking her.
“That lover you’ve taken, who is now the biggest scandal in all of Guatemala!” she screamed. “And it’s not just the military that’s worried. The Church is, too, and so is every decent person in the country.”
He was speechless. Until now, Odilia had never dared to mention Miss Guatemala in any of their fights. He hesitated a moment before responding.
“I don’t have to answer to anyone for my private life!” he shouted violently. “Get that through your goddamn head for once.”
“You do have to answer to me, I’m your wife before God and the law.” Odilia’s eyes and voice were filled with lightning. “You’ll pay dearly for this scandal with that whore. That’s why I met with the officers. They’re worried, and they say this situation’s bad for you and bad for the government.”
“I forbid you to attend any further meetings with traitors!” he yelled, trying to bring all of this to a quick end. “And if you do, I warn you, you’ll face the consequences.”
He walked out, slamming the door behind him.
“Go to hell!” he heard Odilia shout from back in the bedroom. That was the first time Castillo Armas truly considered leaving his wife. He would pay whatever was necessary to annul his marriage in the Church and marry Marta and go live with her. With her he was happy, after all. Miss Guatemala had made him lust again, had made him feel like a man in bed. Who were those officers Odilia was meeting with? Neither shouting nor threats had compelled her to name names. He knew some, but he wasn’t sure of the rest. And that imbecile the Lug had concealed all this from him. Obviously that meeting was an outright conspiracy. Those bastards were planning a coup. Obviously.
The meeting with the natives from Petén went better than expected. He thought they’d come to protest the expropriation of their lands, the dead and wounded from their clashes with the police and the landowners. But no, all they wanted was for the government to restore a church burned in a fire caused by a lightning strike and a subsidy for the friars and two local brotherhoods. Surprised, the president promised them everything they asked.
The meeting with the U.S. ambassador was more complicated. It was about United Fruit—what else? The U.S.A. recognized the efforts the government was making to compensate the company for its many losses under the Arévalo and Árbenz governments, and it was happy the Guatemalan courts and Congress had seen that it was best for the country to revoke the offending laws and restore their former accords. But what about the company’s expenditures to rebuild its destroyed facilities, replace damaged machinery, legal costs, all they’d spent on unjust fines, onerous and arbitrary duties, etc., etc.? The company didn’t expect the state to pay all this, but at the least the losses should be shared, following a review carried out by some neutral, prestigious firm both sides had agreed on. A bit sourly, Castillo Armas reminded the ambassador that all of that lay in the judges’ hands and that his government would respect the courts’ findings and pay whatever damages they assessed.
The ceremony at the Mexican Embassy lasted only half an hour, per his request. He read a speech in which Mario Efraín Nájera Farfán gave free rein to his usual baroque expository leanings, and on more than one occasion, he got lost among the verbiage so pleasing to that gentleman who had ignored the president’s preference for clear, simple texts, ones that wouldn’t create problems for him, throwing at him words he didn’t know the meaning of. (Once again, he told himself he would have to get the man’s attention, even threaten him with dismissal if he kept on giving him trouble with these disquisitions.)
Afterward, he dictated correspondence until lunchtime. He arrived at Marta’s house at around 1:30, but he didn’t enjoy the physical and emotional relaxation he ordinarily found eating with his beloved. He was irritated to discover that the head of the armed forces had organized a dinner to celebrate his birthday and had invited all the ministers in the government, but had failed to invite the president himself.
In the afternoon, back at the Palace, he phoned the minister of defense, Colonel Juan Francisco Oliva, and reproached him, half joking, half serious, for not asking him to the party. Colonel Juan Francisco Oliva said there had to be a mistake, and his surprise seemed sincere. It was true that July 26 was his birthday, but he was absolutely not throwing a party of any kind. To the contrary, he and his wife would be having dinner with their children, as a family, without a single guest. What kind of rumors were these? Who had come up with such a scenario?
The president called Marta, who was shocked, and assured him Margarita Lavalle, the wife of the minister of justice, had asked her to attend the festivities with her, and she wasn’t the type to make things up. At first, Castillo Armas concluded that Colonel Juan Francisco Oliva had indeed organized a party, but that he would cancel it once the president heard he wasn’t invited. Now he and his wife must be phoning the ministers trying to explain why they’d called it off. So Juan Francisco, feeling he’d done something wrong, would be left without a birthday party. Well done! But then something strange slipped into his mind, and the explanation appeared less and less convincing. He had a bad taste in his mouth the rest of the day because of it, and it confirmed his suspicions that he was surrounded by people he couldn’t trust.
The evening’s work weighed on him. At the meeting with the economic experts and the finance minister, he couldn’t concentrate, despite his best efforts. This had happened frequently over the foregoing weeks. He was losing his head, no matter how he tried to make sense of those reunions, where the technocrats talked of loans, Guatemala’s ratings at the IMF, the World Bank, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and other things where he felt at a complete and utter loss, and to make it worse, not one of these experts made the least effort to help him understand what the hell they were talking about. Fortunately, the minister seemed at ease with the figures and jargon, which not only confounded the president, but also bored him. He put on a serious face, kept his eyes on whoever was talking, feigned thorough concentration, and would, very occasionally, dare to comment or formulate a question, as general as possible to avoid looking like a dimwit. Even so, he saw now and again the startled, mocking faces of the experts, which let him know his intervention had missed the mark.
Did he regret it all? No, of course he didn’t. If another situation arose like the one his country had been in before, he would rise up in arms again, fight, put his life on the line against the communists and their allies, the killers of Colonel Francisco Javier Arana, his friend and mentor. Some, including the gringos, were forgetting very quickly all that he had risked to save, among other things, United Fruit, which Árbenz, the Mute, wanted to see on the chopping block. Now the gringos were asking him for moderation against the same leftists that had them up in arms before. Yes, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas had reasons to be disappointed. Especially with his military colleagues. He didn’t have faith in a single one of them anymore. Least of all the Lug, that traitor he had so readily trusted. He was surely among the officers who had met with Odilia to talk about Miss Guatemala. Was his brother, Juan Francisco, there, too? They’d found the perfect pretext to remove him from power. But since all of them were hungry, they couldn’t agree on a leader for the conspiracy. Everyone wanted to be president. For the moment, that had saved him. The insolence! Digging around in his private life, that was the last straw. As if all of them didn’t have lovers, too, on the state’s payroll, naturally.
When the conference with the economists was done, he had to oversee a meeting of representatives who would inform him of the latest developments concerning the laws then passing through Congress. He didn’t feel as lost with them as he did with the others. But he couldn’t concentrate with the congressmen either, or offer any reasonable opinions about the matters they’d come to consult with him over. His mind was incapable of staying attentive to what they were saying apart from brief stretches interrupted by the memory of that mysterious birthday dinner for the minister of defense that wasn’t taking place. Why had Margarita Lavalle made that call to Marta? To get the president to ruin things for Juan Francisco Oliva by calling and asking why he wasn’t invited? What had really happened? It was stupid, a trifle, probably, but there was something there, something in that confusion he would like to clear up. Was it an attempt, perhaps, to put Miss Guatemala in a compromising situation? To kidnap her, blackmail him, and force him into resigning? That was something he’d been afraid of from the moment they’d met, and it was why he had placed her house under permanent guard and forbidden her from going out alone.
When the congressional delegation left (without receiving any clear instructions from him), two secretaries appeared with a pile of letters. Requests, always requests, of all kinds from all parts of the country, generally from humble, impecunious people wanting help and begging shamelessly for money. For a few more hours, he dictated messages and acknowledged the receipt of various reports. At seven thirty, he felt the urge to cancel what remained of his agenda and go home. He was ill at ease, frustrated, dead tired. The prospect of seeing his wife depressed him, but he would forgo arguing with her and get into bed early. He would take his usual pill to get to sleep. The doctor had warned him against more than two or three Nembutals a week, but he downed one every night, because without them, he couldn’t sleep a wink.
He couldn’t leave yet, though. Out there in the waiting room were the ladies of Catholic Action, sent, of course, by the archbishop, another adversary hoping to be rid of him at all cost. He had them sent in, ready to cut them off if they had the temerity to touch, even indirectly, on the subject of Miss Guatemala. But the Catholic ladies avoided the issue. They were there to convey to him the worries besetting Catholic Guatemala, the vast majority of the country, in view of the systematic penetration of Protestant sects, so-called missionaries loaded with dollars who came here to build churches and indoctrinate the Indians; their houses of worship were more like circuses, with grotesque song-and-dance routines featuring black hordes meant to seduce the ignorant natives, after which they would campaign for divorce and a thousand other anti-Catholic practices, even abortion. If the government didn’t put a stop to this aggression against the Catholic church, which was the religion of 99 percent of the population, Guatemala would soon be in the Protestants’ hands.
The president listened attentively, took notes while the ladies spoke, and at the end assured them that the very next day he would order the responsible ministries to get to work on the issue. It was, as they said, a grave matter. He shared their concern. There was no doubt the influx of evangelical pastors had to be stopped. Guatemala was a free country now; it had liberated itself from communism, and it couldn’t fall into some other quasi-pagan barbarism. Eventually the ladies from Catholic Action left, and he was certain each of them had the name Miss Guatemala in their head, though no one had dared to mention her. He knew perfectly well that in their private conversations, these people referred to Marta by the moniker the priests had invented to disparage her: the palace slattern. He’d consulted the dictionary and discovered with indignation that slattern was a synonym for whore.
He closed the day with a meeting with businessmen in the Palace’s great hall. He had called them there himself, and he was surprised so many showed up: more than a hundred, maybe even a hundred fifty. The address was clearer and more substantive than the one at the Mexican Embassy. In detail, he described the economic progress the country was making and encouraged the businessmen, landlords, and industrialists to take a patriotic risk and invest in Guatemala to speed its recovery.
When he entered the Casa Presidencial, his wife, now home from the assembly on education, was shut in the bathroom getting her manicure and pedicure. He was so tired, he lay down in bed as soon as he’d removed his jacket and shoes. He fell asleep immediately. He had a strange dream in which, as he tumbled slowly into a dark hole, he was talking to someone concealed head-to-toe in a blanket and with the mask of a horned animal. This person told him he had to put his life in order and regain his lost joy. He tried but failed to recognize the voice. Who are you? Tell me your name, let me see your face, I’m begging you.
Soon his wife woke him. “Dinner’s ready,” she said. And she added, by way of reproach, “You’ve been asleep for nearly an hour.”
He got up and went to the bathroom to refresh himself, washing his hands and face with cool water. They had to cross a small garden with a single acacia, then enter a hallway, to reach the dining room from the bedroom. No sooner had they stepped out than the colonel noticed something strange, but his wife was the first one to speak:
“Why haven’t they turned the lights on?” she asked. “And where are the servants?”
“And my guards?” he exclaimed. They kept walking, but none of this made sense.
Why was everything dark? And where were the soldiers who stayed put in the garden twenty-four hours a day in front of the vestibule that led out to the street?
“Felipe! Ambrosio!” Odilia called for the butlers, but they neither responded nor appeared.
They were now in the passage that led to the dining room. It was dark there, too.
“Don’t you find all this odd?” Odilia said, turning to her husband.
At that moment, Carlos Castillo Armas realized something, and he was turning to run to his bedroom and grab the machine gun he kept next to the nightstand when the shot rang out behind his back and made him stumble and fall facedown. As he felt the second shot blow through him, he could still manage to hear Odilia’s hysterical screams.