HE WAS SWEATING COPIOUSLY. It wasn’t the heat: from his bed, he could see the blades of the fan whirling over his head, giving off a breeze that blew against his face. It was fear. He had never felt a fear like this before, not that he remembered anyway, not even the day he found out they’d assassinated El Jefe and that his own future had collapsed and that from then on he’d have to get by on his wits, if he was lucky. Fleeing overseas, maybe. What he’d felt back then had been sorrow, rage, loneliness, not fear. Fear was the thing he was feeling now, a fear that was making him drip cold sweat that soaked through his shirt and underwear and made his teeth chatter. Chills paralyzed him, and he had to struggle to keep himself from screaming, asking for help. From whom? God? Did he even believe in God? From Brother Cristóbal, then?
The sun was coming up; he could see a blue band of light far off on the horizon that grew and illuminated his home in Pétion-Ville, its fruit trees, its jacarandas and creepers. Soon the hens would start to cackle and the dogs would set to barking. With the light of day, the fear would diminish and he would have to get hold of himself and depart for the Dominican Embassy, where he had an appointment at 11:00 a.m. Would the ambassador agree to see him, or would he be stuck once more with that consul in the trim suit with the reedy voice and round-framed glasses? Had Balaguer finally given him an answer? He had never imagined, he thought with embarrassment, that one day he’d be so scared he’d have to turn to that petty little man, that godforsaken President Joaquín Balaguer, begging him to save his life and the lives of his wife, Zita, and their two young daughters. Would Balaguer answer him in person? Would he make the magnanimous gesture of pardoning him and repatriating him with his family? Balaguer might be a traitor, but he was an intellectual, too, he had a sense of history, and he wanted his place in posterity. That might suffice to convince him to save the most hated man in the Dominican Republic, as he had called him in their final conversation in Ciudad Trujillo, from a certain and atrocious death when he’d forced him to leave the country with that story about a consular job in Japan.
What a load of rubbish! he thought. A filthy lie. He remembered his horrible days in Tokyo. They hadn’t even given him an office. He’d been living with Zita in a hotel that cost an arm and a leg, and the money for his expenses as a newly installed diplomat never came, let alone his first paycheck. After a few weeks, the chargé d’affaires informed him that for budgetary reasons, his assignment had been revoked, and that the Japanese authorities were giving him and his wife just two weeks to leave the country, since they no longer had a reason for being there. They’d had to return to Paris, where they lived for nearly a year. It was there that Zita gave birth to the first of their daughters, and they spent a good part of the million-plus dollars he’d had tucked away in his Swiss account. It had seemed like a lot of money when he never touched it and it was earning interest, but in a life without income of any sort, it melted like butter in his hands.
What did Abbes García do in those years of exile? Conspire. Write letters and make phone calls to every Dominican official and cop he knew to try to make friends and wrangle them into scheming against Balaguer. They said yes, but none of them lifted a finger. They all wanted tickets to Europe or Canada to see him, of course. But nothing serious ever came of these intrigues. One day, Abbes García realized that none of this would get anywhere if he couldn’t get Ramfis Trujillo on his side. So he wrote him on bended knee, and to his surprise, Ramfis himself responded. He was living in Spain at the time, and agreed to come to Paris to speak with him. He was cordial and open. His hatred for Balaguer rivaled Abbes García’s own. He had finally realized that he, too—none other than Trujillo’s eldest son!—had been manipulated by the sly, unscrupulous fox now sitting in the president’s office. So hungry was Ramfis for power, so keen to be master of the country that had failed to appreciate his father and his family, that Abbes García gave everything in the following months to crafting a strategy that seemed viable, with El Jefe’s son behind him. But this time, too, it failed to take off, because the officers who had once agreed to take part kept their distance, saying a coup could never succeed without the backing of the United States. They vanished, and since then Abbes García’s only conspiracies took place in his imagination. He tried to spend less, because in just a few years his supply of dollars had been reduced by half, and he knew he would never find work. All he knew was torture, bomb making, spying, and killing. Who was going to hire him to do that in Europe?
When they decided to move to Canada in 1964, Zita was pregnant with their second child. He wanted her to get an abortion, but she refused, and in the end, she got her way. Life in Toronto was cheaper than in Paris, but their residency permit lasted only six months, and when they asked for another, they were denied it with the excuse that the money they had left was insufficient to guarantee another six-month stay in the country.
In these circumstances, entirely unexpectedly, Abbes García received an offer to move to Haiti as a security consultant for President François Duvalier.
At a friend’s house in Toronto, he had met a Haitian who spoke very fluent Spanish, having lived for a time in the Dominican Republic. He recognized him immediately: “You’re here? What is Colonel Johnny Abbes García doing in Toronto?” Johnny replied, “Business,” and tried to slither away. The Haitian’s name was François Delony, and from what they told him, he was a journalist. In reality he worked for Papa Doc, Haiti’s indisputable leader since 1957. Delony asked for his number, and called a few days later to invite him to lunch. At the fish house where he took him, he made him the offer that had so surprised him:
“I’ve been learning a lot about you, Mr. Abbes García. I know President Balaguer threw you out of your country and that since then you’ve been roving the world like some kind of pariah. Would you be interested in a serious proposition? A move to Port-au-Prince, to work for the Haitian government.”
Abbes García was stunned, and didn’t answer for several seconds.
“Are you serious?” he finally said. “May I ask you if this offer comes directly from President François Duvalier?”
“From him personally,” Delony replied. “Are you interested? Your role would be adviser to the president on security matters.”
He accepted right away, without even knowing his salary or work conditions. I was an imbecile, he thought. It was daytime now, the hens were clucking, the dogs had begun to bark, and the three servant girls were moving around, making noise in the kitchen.
In a week, he, Zita, and the two girls were in Port-au-Prince at the Hotel Les Ambassadeurs. The first few days were the best ones, Abbes García remembered. The heat, the radiant sun, the scent of the sea, the luxurious vegetation, the merengues, all that reminded him he was back in the Caribbean. He imagined that soon those masses of people would address him in soft Dominican Spanish. But no—the blacks and mulattoes talked in French and Creole and he didn’t understand a damned word. Two days later, they took him to see President Duvalier at his office in the National Palace. It was the first and last time he ever saw him. He was an enigmatic man, a doctor by profession, but more than that, people said, a shaman. The Haitians attributed his power to his practice of voodoo, which fascinated and terrified the people in equal measure. He was tall, slender, well-dressed, of an uncertain age. He received him affably in a dark suit with gleaming shoes, and addressed him in elegant Spanish. He thanked him for coming to collaborate with his government on security matters, in which he knew, he said, that Abbes was an expert. He had kind words for Generalísimo Trujillo, and said that fortunately he got on well with President Balaguer. Here he allowed himself a somewhat cryptic joke:
“Now when he finds out you’re here collaborating with my government, President Balaguer will get a bit agitated, don’t you think?”
A smile passed quickly over his dark face, and his deep-set eyes shone a moment behind his thick glasses. Then he explained that his minister of the interior would be in contact with him to discuss all practical matters. He stood up, gave him his hand, and that was that.
Abbes García hadn’t seen him again in private in the two years he’d lived in Haiti, only from afar, at official events. He had asked for an audience on at least a dozen occasions, but according to the minister of the interior, the president was always busy and simply didn’t have time to see him. Perhaps that was one reason Abbes García had been foolish enough to get into bed with President Duvalier’s son-in-law, Colonel Max Dominique, husband of Dedé, Marie-Denise, Papa Doc’s daughter. When he thought of Dedé, Abbes García felt a tingle in the tip of his penis. It had happened the few times he had seen that woman, so tall, so haughty, with her beautiful body and the cold, hard stare that perfectly conveyed the tyrannical, implacable temperament she was said to possess—very similar to the temperament of her father. How Abbes García had wanted to tongue the gash of that goddess of ebony and ice. The memory of Colonel Max Dominique brought Abbes García back to the reality of his situation. Again, he felt frozen with terror, and his entire body trembled.
He had met Max Dominique at the Military Academy in Pétion-Ville, where he gave classes on security matters. Many coveted the colonel’s proximity to his father-in-law, Papa Doc. He had been cordial with the new arrival, and invited him one day to dinner at his home. That was where he met the woman with the long, beautiful legs, Dedé, the lady of the house, who so fired the longings of the security consultant that after dinner, he’d visited a squalid cathouse in the center of the capital to relieve his tensions between the legs of a hooker he could only communicate with through hand gestures. That was how his relationship with Colonel Max Dominique had begun. Slowly—like an idiot, he thought—he had gotten caught up in his conspiracy to prevent his father-in-law’s son, Dedé’s younger brother, Jean-Claude, also known as Baby Doc, from taking power after his father’s death—this despite President François Duvalier’s having chosen him as his successor. The conspiracy was perverse, in some ways ridiculous: in the multiple meetings that Abbes García had attended, the officers around Max Dominique spoke of it in almost ghostly terms, without dates, without specifying places or weapons, without considering the political ramifications, as if all that were in a gaseous or prenatal state. Then, all of a sudden, word began to get around, without a single line in the papers or a mention in the radio to prove it, that Papa Doc had ordered the execution of nineteen officers from the army for forming part of an attempted conspiracy.
When Abbes García had gotten control of himself, he stood up and went to shower. He spent a long time under the jet of water, which was tepid rather than cold. Then he brushed his teeth and shaved carefully. Finally he dressed in his finest suit and a collared shirt. If he was meeting with the Dominican ambassador, he would need to make the best impression he could. During breakfast—he left his plate of fruit untouched, said he didn’t want eggs, limited himself to a small slice of black bread and a cup of coffee—he thought obsessively about the Dominican Embassy and Balaguer. He had barely eaten those past few days, and he’d had to ask his maids to punch a few more holes in his belt. It was just seven, so he decided to flip through the newspapers one of the girls had left on the table.
There was nothing in them about the dismantled conspiracy, even less about the shooting of the nineteen officers who were implicated, and not a word about the nomination of Max Dominique as the new ambassador to Spain. Nor about his journey to Madrid the day before to assume his post in the company of his wife, Marie-Denise.
Why had President Duvalier forgiven the head of the conspiracy, sending him to a diplomatic post in Spain instead of having him shot with all the army officers who’d plotted against him? It must have been out of love for his daughter, Marie-Denise. Did Papa Doc know that Dedé was the one to put the idea of liquidating him and taking his place into Max Dominique’s head? He had to. François Duvalier knew everything and he couldn’t fail to see that Dedé was wounded and resentful—everyone in Haiti talked about it—because he had chosen her younger brother instead of her to succeed him. And yet, the witch doctor had forgiven his bloodthirsty daughter and was sending her and Max to Spain as diplomats after secretly shooting and burying the military men involved in the conspiracy.
Why hadn’t Duvalier had him shot, too? Had he reserved a special punishment for him, featuring those exquisite tortures he’d been teaching the tonton macoutes at the Military Academy in Pétion-Ville for the last two years? Again, the shaking rose from his feet up to his head, making his teeth chatter. Again, he was sweating, and his once-clean shirt and pants were soaked. He needed to get a handle on his nerves, it wasn’t good for the Dominican ambassador to see him like that, he would certainly pass word along to President Balaguer. And imagine the satisfaction he’d feel if he heard Abbes García was terrified of being punished by Duvalier for conspiring against him with his daughter and son-in-law!
At 8:00 a.m., he entered the room where Zita slept with the girls. His wife was already awake, eating the breakfast the maids had brought her in bed: a cup of tea, a plate of pineapple and papaya, and toast with butter and marmalade. How calm and carefree she seemed: Did she have any idea of the danger they were in? Of course, but she trusted him blindly, and thought he was capable of fixing anything. The poor woman!
“Why aren’t the girls up?” he asked instead of telling her good morning. “Don’t they have school?”
“You yourself said they shouldn’t go,” Zita reminded him. “Don’t you remember? I hope this isn’t the first sign of arteriosclerosis.”
“Sure, right,” he said. “Yeah, until things clear up, it’s better if the girls don’t leave the house. You either.”
She nodded. He envied her: she could die a horrible death at any moment, but there she was eating her fruit as if this were a day like any other. He felt compassion for his wife. Through all those meetings he’d had at Dedé and Max Dominique’s house, she had never gotten upset. When she found out François Duvalier had ordered the nineteen officers involved in the conspiracy shot, she didn’t utter a word. Did she really think he was a superman, capable of emerging miraculously from this monstrous predicament they were in? Up to now, it was true, however bad things got, he’d always found a way out of the thorniest situations; but Abbes García had the sense that this time every door he might run through to escape his bad luck was closed. Vaguely, he remembered how Brother Cristóbal had told him the history of the Rosicrucians back in Mexico, and he missed the peace and serenity he had felt listening to his sermons.
“Are you going to the embassy? Do you think they’ll repatriate us?” she asked as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“Of course,” he said. “Hopefully Balaguer will understand me asking him this favor is a major concession.”
“And if they don’t?” she asked, her voice modulating slightly.
“We’ll see,” he said, shrugging. “Stay put. I’ll come straight back from the embassy to let you know.”
He walked outside. His chauffeur wasn’t there. A bad sign: he had told him the night before to come early. Had he fled? Had they ordered him not to go? He grabbed the keys to his truck and drove himself. He traveled slowly, avoiding the pedestrians who walked back and forth in front of the vehicle with an utter absence of caution, as if avoiding an accident were his responsibility and not theirs. A half hour later, he was parked in front of the Dominican Embassy in downtown Port-au-Prince. It was a few minutes before the hour, and he waited inside the car with the air-conditioning on. When his watch told him it was eleven, he turned off the motor, got out, and rang at the embassy door. The same brown-haired girl greeted him who had done so three days before.
“The consul is expecting you,” she said with a very friendly smile. “Please come in.”
So he wouldn’t be meeting with the ambassador this time, either. The girl took him to the same office as last time. The consul was wearing the same snug gray suit, which looked too tight to let him properly breathe. He smiled the same forced smile and looked at him with the same sparkling eyes. Johnny remembered them well.
“Any news, sir?” Abbes García asked, getting straight to the point.
“Unfortunately not, Colonel,” the consul responded, motioning for him to take a seat. “We don’t have an answer yet.”
Abbes García felt sweat pouring down his face and his heart pounding in his chest.
“I was hoping I could speak to the ambassador,” he burbled, and in his tone there was something imploring. “I’ll only take ten minutes, five minutes of his time. Please, sir. This is a very serious matter. I need to explain it to him in person.”
“The ambassador isn’t here, Colonel,” the consul replied. “He’s not in Haiti, I mean. He’s been called to Santo Domingo on business.”
Abbes García knew the consul was lying. He was sure that if he kicked down the door to the ambassador’s office, he would see him there, frightened, behind his desk, offering explanations that would just be more lies.
“You don’t understand my situation,” he added, struggling to get out his words. “My life, the lives of my wife and children are in danger. I explained all this in my letter to President Balaguer. If they kill us, it will be an international scandal and people will blame him. A scandal that could have grave political consequences for his government. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand perfectly, Colonel, I swear,” the consul said, shaking his head. “We’ve explained the matter to the ministry with a wealth of details. They must be studying your case. As soon as there is an answer, I will let you know personally.”
“Either you don’t understand or you’re lying to me,” Abbes García said, no longer able to contain himself. “Do you think there’s time for that? They could kill us today, this very afternoon. I deserve protection under the law. We are Dominican citizens. We have the right to immediate repatriation.”
The consul got up from his desk and sat down next to Abbes García. He seemed to be struggling to say something, but he didn’t dare. His tiny eyes looked from left to right. When he spoke, he lowered his voice to a near-whisper.
“Let me give you a bit of advice, Colonel. Seek asylum. Don’t wait. At the Mexican consulate, for example. I’m telling you this as a friend, not an official. You will not receive a response to your letter to President Balaguer. I am certain of it. I’m risking my job telling you this, Colonel. I’m doing so out of Christian charity, because I understand your and your family’s situation. Don’t wait.”
Abbes García tried to get up, but his tremors had come back, and he let himself slump again in the chair. Did that advice make sense? Maybe. But they had expelled him from Mexico years ago as an undesirable alien. Argentina, then. Or Brazil. Or Paraguay. Despite the shaking in his legs, he managed to stand up on the second try. Not bothering to say goodbye to the consul, walking like an automaton, he turned toward the front door. He didn’t respond to the farewell from the brown-haired girl. He sat in his truck without turning on the motor until his twitching stopped. Yes, he would try to seek asylum in a Latin American embassy. But not Mexico. Brazil, yes, Brazil. Or Paraguay. Did those countries have embassies in Port-au-Prince? He would look in the phone book. The son of a bitch—Balaguer had gotten his letter and hadn’t bothered to answer. To cover up the traces. He wanted Papa Doc to kill him, obviously. Maybe President Duvalier had even consulted with him about it. What should I do with him, Mr. President? And that fox, who never committed himself, must have responded: I will leave that to Your Excellency’s wisdom. He was terrified of seeing Johnny show up in the Dominican Republic to mobilize the many followers El Jefe still had, not only inside the military. He wanted Papa Doc to do his dirty work and get rid of him.
When he passed the Pétion-Ville Military Academy, he remembered the work he had done those previous two years, the talks he used to give the cadets on security, the special cases he described to the officers and the auxiliary squads of ex-prisoners and delinquents with a rap sheet known as the tonton macoutes. He spoke slowly, using notes that the interpreter would translate into Creole. Were they useful for something? At the very least, the officers, cadets, and auxiliaries seemed interested. They asked him lots of questions about how to make a prisoner talk. You use fear, he had told them a thousand times. You’ve got to make them very scared. Of being castrated. Of being burned alive. Of having their eyes gouged out. Of getting a broomstick or a bottle shoved up their ass. They need to feel panic, terror, the same kind he was feeling just then. He’d even had them buy an electric chair like the one in La Cuarentena back in Ciudad Trujillo, like the one General Ramfis had at the Aviation Academy. With a difference: the electric chair in Pétion-Ville never functioned as it was supposed to. The electricity couldn’t be dosed out, and it killed the prisoners immediately instead of frying them little by little till they talked. All that money just to char a prisoner to a crisp. He laughed reluctantly at the memory of his students’ giggles when he told them how, during interrogations back in Ciudad Trujillo, while his prisoners shrieked and pleaded, he liked to recite sentimental poems by Amado Nervo or sing songs by Agustín Lara.
It had been madness to conspire with Max Dominique. Stupid, insane, shameful, and now he would probably end up sitting in the electric chair at the Military Academy in Pétion-Ville. It had all been a tremendous mistake, starting with coming to Haiti, a third-rate country where everything always went to hell. Why hadn’t Papa Doc put him in front of the firing squad along with the rest of the officers? What tortures did he have planned for him? Of course his friend Balaguer was in on it. When he entered his home in Pétion-Ville, Abbes García’s pants, shirt, jacket, and even tie were soaked with sweat.
Zita was in the living room with the children reading them a story. When she saw him in this state, she turned pale. He shook his head.
“The ambassador didn’t see me, just the same flunky as always.” His voice was wavering, but he thought that if he cried in front of his wife, he’d terrify her as well as the two girls. With superhuman effort, he restrained himself. He added very slowly, feeling how his voice betrayed his fear: “Balaguer hasn’t responded to my letter. We need to seek asylum. I’m going to call the embassy in Brazil right now. Bring me the phone book, please.”
While Zita went to look for it, the girls remained sitting on the sofa. They both looked like their mother; neither looked like him. They were well-dressed in blue smocks and little white shoes. In their motionlessness, their serenity, their seriousness, there was something like a premonition of the grave things that were about to occur, and they seemed to think it best not to ask their father what might happen.
When Abbes García saw Zita return to the living room, he noticed there was no phone book in her hands, and he was about to upbraid her when his wife’s pallor and the look of terror in her eyes stopped him. She was tall and shapely, but she had grown thin in the preceding days. She had raised one arm, and was pointing outside. What is it? he murmured, taking a few steps toward the large window that looked out onto their garden and the street. Trucks were parking in front of their door. First there were three of them, then a fourth pulled in behind them. Men jumped out in overalls, T-shirts, and black berets—the uniform of the tonton macoutes. He counted at least twenty of them. In their hands, they held clubs and knives and—he was sure, even if he couldn’t see them—automatics and revolvers were tucked into their thick black belts. They lined up in front of his house, waiting for an order. They’re here, he thought. He didn’t know what to do or what to say.
“What are you waiting for, Johnny?” Zita exclaimed behind him. He turned and saw his wife embracing the two girls, who were hanging on their mother and crying. “Do something, do something, Johnny.”
My revolver, he thought, and ran to the bedroom to take it out of the drawer in the nightstand where he kept it locked up. He would kill Zita and the girls, and then he would kill himself.
But in the bedroom, he looked out the window and saw that the tonton macoutes (how many of them had been his students at the Military Academy in Pétion-Ville?) were still there in formation in front of the railing and the door that led to the garden. Why weren’t they coming in? Now they did. One man kicked the wooden door and sent it flying, and they stomped in, passed through the garden in a platoon and walked toward the henhouses, ignoring the barking of the dogs that rushed forward to meet them. Believing and yet disbelieving all he was seeing, Abbes García, revolver in hand, watched the tonton macoutes take over, crushing the flowers and vegetable beds, beating and stabbing the two dogs to death, then stomping and kicking them until their bodies were coated in blood.
He ran to the living room and saw that the three maids were there, too, holding each other, their eyes not shifting from the window. Zita didn’t even try to calm the girls, who were holding on to her and shrieking: what was happening in the garden had hypnotized her. After the dogs, the invaders had turned their rage on the chickens. Feathers were flying, and the cackles of the birds and the howling and cursing of the raiders was deafening.
“They’ve killed the dogs and the chickens,” Zita said. “Now they’re coming for us.”
The three maids were on their knees alternately praying and weeping. The slaughter and the shouting wouldn’t stop. Absurdly, Abbes García ordered the women to lock the door, but they didn’t hear or didn’t have the strength to obey him.
When he saw the front door of the house give way and the first faces, black with glassy eyes (they’ve been drugged, Abbes thought) peeked in, he lifted his revolver and fired. But instead of recoil, what he felt was the thud of the hammer against an absent cartridge. He’d forgotten to load it, and would die without defending himself, without killing even one of those repulsive black bastards who, following very clear instructions, left him and Zita and the children standing there, turning their clubs and knives on the maids and beating and stabbing them as they shouted an incomprehensible babble of insults and curses. He hugged Zita and the girls, who were shaking as they pressed their heads into his chest, no longer strong enough to cry.
The tonton macoutes jumped now on the bodies of the maids, or what was left of them, in a strange dance. Abbes García saw blood on their hands, on their faces, on their clothes, on their clubs, and more than a massacre, the thing seemed like a primal, barbarous feast, a ritual. Never in his worst nightmares had he imagined that he would die like this, butchered by a horde of niggers who could have used their pistols but preferred more primitive weapons, the clubs and knives mankind had used in caverns and forests since prehistoric times.
Neither Johnny Abbes García nor Zita nor the girls saw the end of all that. It was instead seen by a witness, the born-again Christian Dorothy Sanders. She was a neighbor, and they had exchanged no more than the barest greetings despite living on the same street. She would say later, taking tranquilizers for her nerves and determined to give up her missionary job and return to the United States as soon as possible, that once the horrible slaughter was over, the blacks had emptied cans of kerosene on the dwelling and had set it on fire. She had watched the house burn to a mound of ash while the murderers and pyromaniacs got into their trucks and left, satisfied, surely, at a job well done.