WHEN MISS GUATEMALA RECEIVED that invitation from General Héctor Bienvenido Trujillo Molina, better known as Negro Trujillo on account of his mulatto features, she was well established in Ciudad Trujillo, as the Dominican capital was then known. She had taken a long time to figure out that the country possessed a president of the republic, elected and reelected with an impeccable show of legality, who was not Generalísimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, Benefactor and Patriarch of the New Fatherland. No, the president was his brother, a puppet the country’s lord and master had installed to placate the North Americans who, after giving him their unconditional approval, had lately reproached him for the eternity he’d spent in office and the utter lack of any hint of democracy in the country since he’d risen to power in a coup d’état in the year 1930. And it was 1960 now! Like Marta, most of the people living in the Dominican Republic were more or less unaware that apart from Generalísimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, there was a president, or the appearance of one, there to satisfy the gringos’ requirement of a democratic facade. The Dominican Republic was their adoptive child, but recently, the two countries weren’t getting along.
Marta showed the invitation to Colonel Abbes García, who’d gotten a promotion years back and was now the powerful head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM). He examined it at length, scratching his dewlap and pinching together his brows. In a low voice, he warned her:
“Be careful, Martita. Negro Trujillo isn’t a bad guy, but he’s an idiot. He’s got nothing to do except stand around like an ornament at whatever ceremonies the Generalísimo thinks are too boring to attend, and his life is devoted to listening to the private conversations of families in houses we’ve bugged and screwing his friends’ wives. If you show up to that appointment, prepare yourself for the worst.”
Abbes García had gotten a little fatter since she met him: his fitted uniform now swelled at the belly and emphasized the ridges of fat on his arms and buttocks; he had a growing double chin and his puffy face made his bug eyes even more prominent. As the absolute head of the country’s secret police and espionage services, he was feared and hated wherever he went. Though Marta was his mistress, and hadn’t dared to be with another man as long as she had been, she saw less and less of him. She would always remember that first night of lovemaking (could she even call it that?) with the then–lieutenant colonel from the Dominican Republic in that hotel in El Salvador where he had promised, with thuggish vulgarity, to fuck her in the ass and make her scream. He wasn’t the savage lion he boasted of being; he had a stunted penis and ejaculated early, and the act was finished no sooner than it had begun, leaving her and the other women he slept with rather frustrated. The only thing he really liked was sinking his head between a woman’s legs and licking her. Did he even sleep with his wife, Lupe, a mannish Mexican who walked around with a revolver, letting the handle stick up intentionally out of her purse? Marta wondered, and it made her smile. Lupe was a wreck with her big tits, wide hips, fleshy ears, and cruel, immobile eyes. There were all kinds of nasty rumors about her. They said she went with Johnny to all the brothels in Ciudad Trujillo and liked to whip the whores before she let them pleasure her. Marta had been introduced to her once or twice, and the three of them had gone out together to play roulette at the Hotel Jaragua. Marta was generally fearless, but she felt uncomfortable and apprehensive around the Mexican, who had nevertheless treated her kindly the whole time. It was known that Lupe accompanied Abbes García to La Cuarenta and other penitentiaries where they tortured and killed suspected conspirators or agitators working against Trujillo. It was said that in these torture sessions she was even crueler than her husband.
“How did you ever wind up marrying such an ugly woman?” Marta asked Johnny one night when they were in bed.
He didn’t get angry. Instead he turned serious, and reflected for a while before responding. In the end, his answer was vague:
“What we have isn’t love, it’s complicity. Sex isn’t what brings us together, not our hearts, either: it’s blood. That’s the strongest bond there can be between a man and a woman. Anyway, I doubt I’ll be with Lupe much longer.”
And it was true: she soon found out the colonel had divorced Lupe and married a Dominican named Zita. Since he never mentioned the subject, Marta acted as if she didn’t know. She still saw him, but less and less often.
Had Abbes García been good to her? Undoubtedly, if it was actually true that he had saved her life back in Guatemala the night they killed Castillo Armas and that miserable lieutenant colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva, the real killer, according to Abbes García, tried to have her arrested for complicity in the murder. Here in Ciudad Trujillo, he had set her up in a modest pension on Calle El Conde in the colonial city the day they arrived by private plane from El Salvador, and three years later, he was still paying for it from his own pocket, since her salary at La Voz Dominicana hardly covered anything and she was barely able to get by. In the early days, Abbes García would spend the night with her once or twice a week, taking her out occasionally to the cabarets and casinos and giving her money to bet on roulette. But in the past few months, he’d been kept away by the invasion attempts and terrorist attacks against the regime, financed by Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, or so he said. All that perplexed Marta, and though she didn’t tell anyone, she had the feeling the Trujillo regime was plagued with internal weaknesses, irrespective of its solid appearance, and that its enemies at home and abroad, like the church and, now, the United States, were slowly undermining it. The harshest blow had come from the OAS (the Organization of American States), at the recent meeting in Costa Rica in August 1960, when the member countries, with the United States at the lead, chose to impose a trade embargo on the Dominican Republic and break off diplomatic relations.
Her radio programs had made her a well-known figure, but money remained her greatest preoccupation. Abbes García took care of her room and board, but she had left Guatemala with little more than the clothes on her back. The dollars she’d saved thanks to that gringo whose name wasn’t Mike were only enough to buy a few clothes and other absolute necessities. Fortunately, Abbes offered her the job at La Voz Dominicana, a new radio station where he was an investor, before her first month in exile was out. That income, however scant, was a blessing for her. Not just that: more than a job for her, opinion journalism would become a profession, and her public face over the years. At first, she contributed brief commentaries that she would write and rewrite several times before reading them into the microphone. Soon these were reduced to notes she would use to improvise. She had a knack for it, and would often get impassioned, raise her voice, even break out in sobs. She talked about current affairs and politics in Central America and the Caribbean, with ferocious tirades against real and alleged communists. Communist, communism—those were words that for her embraced a vast swath of people of assorted ideologies and characters; all it took to be a communist was an attack or criticism leveled against the dictators, strongmen, and caudillos dead or alive—men like Trujillo, Carías, Odría, Somoza, Papa Doc, Rojas Pinilla, Pérez Jiménez, and all the South American despots present and past—whom she defended and lauded without exception. Her perennial subject, of course, was Guatemala. There was no end to her venomous assaults on the military junta that replaced Castillo Armas after his assassination. But her most unhinged invective was directed toward the so-called Liberationists, the companions and followers of Castillo Armas who had invaded Guatemala from Honduras in 1954. For a long time, she accused them of being his killers. Her worst harangues were reserved for Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Castillo Armas’s chief of security, now locked up in some prison in Guatemala. She accused him not only of overseeing the conspiracy to kill Castillo Armas, but also of contriving to blame the assassination on the communists and protect the true criminals. She immediately rejected the Guatemalan authorities’ contention that the foot soldier Romeo Vásquez Sánchez was the guilty party. The secret diary where he confessed to being a communist she denounced as a farce, and along with it his alleged suicide, which she swore was meant to protect the real culprits.
Her programs made her very popular in the Dominican Republic. People recognized her on the streets and asked for her autograph or a photo with her. Her attacks on the Guatemalan Liberationists—the traitors as she called them insistently—were brutal. Her acid broadcasts gave her the immense pleasure of meeting Generalísimo Trujillo in person. One morning, Abbes García appeared at the offices of La Voz Dominicana just as she was emerging from the studio and told her: Come with me, you’re going to meet El Jefe. He took her to the National Palace, where they were whisked immediately into the Generalísimo’s office. She was dumbstruck when she saw the man with the imposing, gentlemanly bearing, well dressed, with gray hair on his temples and sideburns. His penetrating stare made her eyes fill with tears.
“Colonel Castillo Armas was a man of good taste,” the Generalísimo said in his reedy voice, examining every inch of her. Immediately afterward, he congratulated her for her speeches on La Voz Dominicana.
“It’s good that you’re attacking the Liberationists’ lies. It goes without saying, they were Castillo Armas’s true killers,” Trujillo said to her. “But now it’s important that you support General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes’s government. He’s a good friend, and he’s doing what has to be done in the country. The Liberationists are trying to cut him off at the knees. In essence, they’re weaklings, and they’re allowing the communists to infiltrate their ranks. Ydígoras Fuentes has more than enough courage, though, and I’m sure he will soon punish Castillo Armas’s murderers.”
Before leaving, Martita kissed El Jefe’s hand. On every program afterward, she championed General Ydígoras Fuentes without reserve. The president, who took office on March 2, 1958, was the only one capable of emulating in Guatemala the work Generalísimo Trujillo had carried out in the Dominican Republic, she said, putting the country in order, bringing economic progress, and putting an end to red sedition.
What role had Abbes García played in the murder of Carlos Castillo Armas? The question brought uncertainty and grief to Miss Guatemala for years. The way things had happened pointed to the Dominican as a link, if not the intellectual and perhaps even material agent of the assassination. Wasn’t his main reason in approaching her to get a private appointment with Castillo Armas? Had she not seen and heard Abbes García offer to murder Arévalo and Árbenz in the name of Trujillo? Had the then–lieutenant colonel not fled Guatemala two days before the crime? Was this to conceal all traces of his links to it? Marta had doubts about it all: the night she reached San Salvador, it seemed to her that Abbes García had arrived just a few minutes before her. And hadn’t Gacel let slip that Abbes García was escaping Guatemala just as they were? Every time she raised the matter, the chief of the Military Intelligence Service cut her off, forcing her to change the subject. Why did it make him so uncomfortable? She had her suspicions about him, but she didn’t dare accuse him, because she was dependent on him so long as she was in Ciudad Trujillo. Over the years, whenever he mentioned Castillo Armas, Abbes García would adopt a contemptuous tone, calling him a weakling, characterless, a bad choice for the CIA to head the Liberationists’ revolution against Árbenz, a mediocrity, without authority or any vision of the future, an ingrate who had treated Trujillo badly, despite the money, weapons, and men the latter had supplied him with for his army before the coup. And hadn’t Castillo Armas started handing land out to the peasants after revoking the Agrarian Reform law, the Trojan horse of communism in Guatemala? In human terms, his murder was unfortunate, but whoever had killed him had salvaged the anticommunist movement in Guatemala. Thankfully, General Ydígoras Fuentes was now in power, a man who was following Trujillo’s model in the Dominican Republic to his country’s benefit.
Marta sang Ydígoras Fuentes’s praises daily on her program, which came through loud and clear in Guatemala. La Voz Dominicana’s studios were the most powerful in the entire Caribbean, and their broadcasts reached Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Miami, and all of Central America.
One day, coming out of the booth after finishing her program, Marta found herself face-to-face—what a surprise—with the gringo whose name wasn’t Mike. He was little changed, a bit thinner than she remembered, but still in his jeans, boots, and plaid shirt. They hugged like old friends.
“I thought I’d never see you again, Mike.”
“You’ve made quite a name for yourself in the Dominican Republic. Congratulations, Martita,” he said. “Everyone’s telling me about your program. And not just in Ciudad Trujillo. All over the Caribbean. All over Central America. You’re a famous political commentator now.”
“I’ve been waging the battle for years,” Miss Guatemala said. “I’ll never be able to thank you for your help back there, when Castillo Armas’s killers were about to murder me.”
“Let me take you for a bite to eat,” Mike said. “They just opened a new pizzeria, Vesuvio, here on the esplanade.”
They went to the restaurant, and the gringo treated her to an excellent pizza margherita with a glass of Chianti. He was there to tell her he was spending a lot of time in the Dominican Republic now, and he would like to resume their regular conversations, the same as back in Guatemala.
“Are you going to pay me?” she asked him point-blank. Then she continued: “You see, back in Guatemala, I had someone taking care of me, so those little extras you gave me were just that. Here I have to earn a living on my own. It’s not easy, I can assure you.”
“Of course, of course I’ll pay you,” Mike said, reassuring her. “I’ll take care of it, you can count on it.”
After that, if Mike was in Ciudad Trujillo, they would meet once a week in different places—restaurants, cafés, parks, churches, at Marta’s pension, or at the elegant hotels where the gringo stayed. Their conversation was exclusively political. Martita would repeat for him everything she talked about on the radio and, most importantly for Mike, whatever Abbes García told her about the stability of the regime and his own work for it. At the end, just as before, he would hand Marta an envelope of dollars. When she asked once if they were both working for the CIA, he smiled and told her in English: No comment.
Not only did the two of them talk; Mike gave her little jobs, finding out something about someone, taking messages to men and women she didn’t know, usually military figures.
“Am I risking my life doing this?” she asked him once when they were walking along the pier looking at the sea, which shimmered almost white at that hour.
“Under Generalísimo Trujillo, everyone in the country is risking their life just being here,” he responded. “You’re perfectly aware of that, Martita.”
It was true. In recent years, the situation had deteriorated progressively. Marta realized it when she saw the growing worry of Johnny Abbes, who seemed more anxious on those few occasions when she saw him. According to him, there had been new attempts at invasion, and deaths as a consequence. All over, there was talk of raids and roundups, people disappearing without a trace, firing squads at the military bases, the murder of members of the opposition, whose bodies were left spread-eagled in the street or else fed to the sharks, according to some. Even at La Voz Dominicana, the regime’s own station, Marta often heard murmurs from employees, announcers, and journalists about the ongoing decline in the political situation. She began to feel something like panic. What if Trujillo fell and the communists took over, like in Cuba? She had nightmares of being trapped in a country where the Catholic religion would be forbidden—she had become deeply devout, never missed a Sunday Mass, and took part in processions in the colonial city clad in a veil and shawl. The prisons and concentration camps would fill up, and she would certainly end up in one, too, as a known anticommunist and champion of Trujillo and all the strongmen and military dictators throughout Latin America.
It was in these circumstances that she received the invitation of General Héctor Trujillo, President of the Republic, to visit him in his office at the National Palace two days later, at seven in the evening. It arrived in the hands of a uniformed motorcyclist, and her workmates joked with her about it. Why was she only being invited to see the president now, when she’d been nearly three years in the Dominican Republic?
Marta smartened up as best she could—she hardly had dresses to choose from—and took a taxi to the National Palace at the appointed hour. An official walked her through the many rooms and chambers, which were now beginning to empty out, and left her in an anteroom, where she had to wait for a few minutes. Finally, the door of the president’s office opened, and she was shown in. Negro Trujillo was dressed in a general’s uniform, with an array of medals pinned to his chest, and as soon as she entered, Martita felt the blast of the air-conditioning, which kept the sumptuous office almost freezing. Her first impression of him was horrible. He was talking on the phone, and motioned for her to sit down; she detested the insolent way he gawked at every inch of her with his lascivious yellow eyes while continuing his conversation. Things went on this way for several minutes; as he spoke, the president stripped her naked with his stare, shamelessly and impertinently. She was starting to be irritated.
When he hung up, he smiled, his lips peeling away from his teeth. He walked over to shake her hand and sat down across from her. He was a stocky mulatto, a bit on the short side, with a swollen belly.
“I was very excited to meet you,” he said, still examining her crudely. He was dark-skinned, with a broad, meaty face and tiny, overactive hands. “I’ve been listening to your programs on La Voz Dominicana for a long time. Allow me to congratulate you. Naturally your ideas are the same as mine. And the rest of the regime’s.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President,” she said. “May I ask you to what I owe the honor of this invitation?”
“They told me you were not just a good journalist, but also a very beautiful woman,” the president said, his obscene, smiling eyes taking on a capricious expression. “And I must confess, I have a weakness for beauty.”
Marta felt less flattered than offended. She didn’t know what bothered her more: his stare or his metallic voice, noxious and lustful.
“Let’s not beat around the bush,” he said brusquely, rising to his feet. “I’m a very busy man, as you can well imagine, Martita. So we will get straight to the reason you are here.”
He walked to his desk, picked up an envelope, and handed it to her. Baffled, unsure what to say, Martita opened it. There was a check signed Héctor Bienvenido Trujillo Molina, with the amount left blank.
“What is this all about, Mr. President?” she asked softly, knowing and not wanting to know what it meant.
“You can write the amount in yourself,” Negro Trujillo said, devouring her with his greedy eyes. “Whatever you think you’re worth, that’s what I think you’re worth.”
Martita stood up. She was ashen and trembling.
“I don’t have time to waste on these things,” he explained, speaking without hesitation, firing off words. “I mean, I don’t have time to waste on romance. That’s why I said we shouldn’t beat around the bush. I want to have sex with you. I want us to have a good time together. And why should I get you a present when you can get one yourself…”
He couldn’t finish the phrase before Marta slapped him hard enough to send him wobbling. Nor was that all. Without giving him time to react, she pounced, striking him with both hands and shouting, “No one treats me like that, not you or anyone else,” biting his ear and ignoring the blows he answered back with. She wouldn’t let go, she had sunk her teeth in with all her strength and the indignation that was now seeping from her pores. She heard him howling something, a door opened, men in uniform entered, they grabbed her, pulled her away from the president, and she watched him bring both hands to his ear in shock—she’d almost torn it off—roaring:
“Jail! Take that crazy bitch to jail!”
She must have fainted from the punches and kicks that fell on her as the president’s guard tried to separate her from him. Only vaguely, as if it were a dream, did she recall them dragging her down several hallways and a flight of stairs. When she came to, she was in a kind of cell, a windowless room with a single chair. It was lit tenuously by a bulb with flies and mosquitoes buzzing around it. Her watch had fallen off in the scuffle. Or had they stolen it? The worst part of the forty-eight hours she spent closed up in the basement of the National Palace wasn’t the lack of food and water, but not knowing the hour, if it was day or night, how quickly or slowly time was passing. All around her was an overbearing silence, interrupted only occasionally by distant footsteps. She must have been in the remotest part of the vaults under the building. Not knowing what time it was somehow worried her more than her future. Were they going to kill her? How horrible it would be to remain shut up in there, in this room with one chair, unable to go to the bathroom or otherwise attend to her needs, dying little by little from starvation and thirst. The hunger she could handle, but the dryness in her throat was driving her mad. Her tongue felt like sandpaper. She lay on the floor, but the discomfort and the pain from the beating the guards had given her made it impossible to sleep. She took off her shoes and noticed a dreadful swelling in her feet. Not for a single moment did she regret the fury she’d unleashed on Negro Trujillo or clawing and striking him and biting his ear with all the strength her jaws could muster. She’d heard that mulatto bastard shrieking like a crushed rat and had seen the fear and surprise in his yellowy eyes. He could offend a woman, sure, but he couldn’t defend himself. How that bastard cried—she had scared him. Even if they killed her for it, she had no regrets, and would gladly do the same thing again. Never in her life had she felt so offended, brutalized, humiliated as when that son of a bitch passed her that envelope and she saw the check inside and realized what he was proposing. The thought that she’d be willing to write down how much she wanted to make in exchange for being a whore! She smiled in the midst of her pain and uncertainty, remembered her teeth sinking into his gelatinous flesh.
She managed to sleep at times, and when she did, she dreamed that all that had been a nightmare. When she woke, she understood the nightmare was real. A sensation of doom invaded her, the certainty that those degenerates would leave her there to starve and that the worst moments would be the last ones, still to come. Then she would remember Guatemala City, Dr. Efrén García Ardiles, and the son she’d abandoned just a few years after his birth. Had his father talked to him about her? She dreamed she was urinating, and when she awoke, she noticed her underwear and skirt were damp. Would she eventually shit herself, too? She thought nebulously about her father, her housemaid Símula, who had taken such good care of her. Was the child she gave birth to still alive? He would be ten now. Could Efrén García Ardiles have left him at an orphanage? Trencito—was he alive? She hadn’t heard a word about him. Once in a while, Símula would send her a few lines about her father, who remained confined to his home and sunk in despair. Her stomach hurt. The father who had adored her when she was a girl only later to reject her was now prey to bottomless rancor. Was Arturo Borrero Lamas still alive? Her thirst began to torment her, and she dragged herself to the door, pounding and screaming for a glass of water. But no one answered. There were no guards nearby, or if there were, they’d been ordered not to communicate with her. With time, weariness and weakness overtook her, and she lay there on the floor counting—her secret since girlhood for falling asleep.
When the door finally opened, men in uniform came in, lifted her up, smoothed out her clothes, and dragged her down several hallways and up some stairs. She was weak, and could only ask, for the love of God, for a little water, please, she was dying of thirst. They seemed not to hear her. They hauled her dead weight across corridors and through various rooms, stopping before a door that flew open immediately. She saw Generalísimo Trujillo himself in front of her, along with Negro Trujillo with a bandaged ear and Johnny Abbes García. The three of them observed her, alarm in their eyes. The soldiers tugged her over to an armchair and let her fall. Finally, Marta was able to get out one phrase:
“Water, please. Water. Water.”
When they gave her a glass, she drank from it in small sips, closing her eyes, feeling how the cold liquid entered her body and brought her back to life.
“In my own name and in my brother’s, I beg your forgiveness for what has happened,” she heard Generalísimo Trujillo say in his solemn, reedy voice. “He will personally ask your forgiveness as well.”
And since the puppet president of the Dominican Republic was dawdling in making himself heard, the Generalísimo, in a firmer tone, asked:
“What are you waiting for?”
Then, making the best of a bad situation, Negro Trujillo sputtered, “I beg your pardon, miss.”
“That’s a sorry, mediocre way of asking forgiveness,” the Generalísimo said. “You ought to have told her: I acted like an ill-mannered pig and a thug, and I kneel before you now to apologize for having offended you with my uncouth behavior.”
El Jefe’s words were followed by an ominous silence. Martita had been handed a second glass of water, and she continued drinking it drop by drop, feeling the gratitude in her body, her veins, her bones as it seemed to restore her from within.
“You can go now, Negro,” Trujillo said. “But first, you’d better remember one very important thing. You don’t exist. Don’t forget that, especially when you get the urge to do something stupid, like your actions with this lady here. You don’t exist. You are my invention. And just as I invented you, I can uninvent you whenever I feel like it.”
She heard steps, the opening and closing of a door. The puppet president had gone.
“I can see the lady is in a terrible state,” the Generalísimo said. “Have her put up in the finest hotel in Ciudad Trujillo. A doctor should look at her right away. Be sure they do a thorough examination. She is the government’s guest and will be treated with the utmost attention. Now.”
“Yes, Jefe,” Abbes García said. “Right away.”
He bent down and gave her his arm, and with great effort, she managed to stand. She tried to thank the Generalísimo, but she had lost her voice. She wanted to vomit and go to sleep. Tears flowed from her eyes.
“Be strong, Martita,” Abbes García told her as soon as they were through the door.
“What’s going to happen to me now?” she babbled, holding on to the colonel’s arm with both hands and stumbling through the rooms and hallways.
“First, you’ll spend a few days at the Hotel Jaragua, getting treated like a queen thanks to the Generalísimo,” Abbes García said. Then he added, lowering his voice, “As soon as you’re better, you need to leave. El Jefe has offended Negro Trujillo, and that mulatto bastard can hold a grudge, he’ll try to have you killed. For now, be calm, rest, and try to recover. I’ll talk to Mike and we’ll figure out how to get you out of here as soon as possible.”