Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyone’s who lived in the States; a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass. (Who says that we Third World people are inefficient?) It wasn’t just Mr. Friday the Thirteenth you had to worry about, either, it was the whole Chivato Nation he helped spawn, for like every Dark Lord worth his Shadow he had the devotion of his people.↓
≡ So devoted was the pueblo, in fact, that, as Galíndez recounts in La Era de Trujillo, when a graduate student was asked by a panel of examiners to discuss the pre-Columbian culture in the Americas, he replied without hesitation that the most important pre-Columbian culture in the Americas was ‘the Dominican Republic during the era of Trujillo’. Oh, man. But what’s more hilarious is that the examiners refused to fail the student, on the grounds that ‘he had mentioned El Jefe’.
It was widely believed that at anyone time between forty-two and eighty-seven percent of the Dominican population was on the Secret Police’s payroll. Your own fucking neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut in front of them at the colmado. Mad folks went out in that manner, betrayed by those they considered their panas, by members of their own families, by slips of the tongue. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, cracking nuts on your galería, the next day you were in the Cuarenta, getting your nuts cracked. Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (You wonder why two generations later our parents are still so damn secretive, why you’ll find out your brother ain’t your brother only by accident.)
But let’s not go completely overboard: Trujillo was certainly formidable, and the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways, but there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted. But Abelard was simply not one of them. Homeboy wasn’t like his Mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was happening elsewhere in the world, who believed that change was possible. He didn’t dream of revolution, didn’t care that Trotsky had lived and died not ten blocks from his student pension in Coyoacán; wanted only to tend his wealthy, ailing patients and afterward return to his study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown to the sharks. Every now and then one of his acquaintances — usually Marcus — would describe for him the latest Trujillo Atrocity: an affluent clan stripped of its properties and sent into exile, an entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compare Trujillo to Adolf Hitler before a terrified audience of his peers, a suspicious assassination in Bonao of a well-known unionist. Abelard listened to these horrors tensely, and then after an awkward silence would change the subject. He simply didn’t wish to dwell on the fates of Unfortunate People, on the goings-on in Peaksville. He didn’t want those stories in his house. The way Abelard saw it — his Trujillo philosophy, if you will — he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then, he prophesied, Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy.
Abelard, it turned out, needed help in the prophecy department. Santo Domingo never became a democracy. He didn’t have no couple of decades, either. His luck ran out earlier than anyone expected.
THE BAD THING
Nineteen forty-five should have been a capital year for Abelard and Family. Two of Abelard’s articles were published to minor acclaim, one in the prestigious — and the second in a small journal out of Caracas, and he received complimentary responses from a couple of Continental doctors, very flattering indeed. Business in the supermercados couldn’t have been better; the Island was still flush from the war boom and his managers couldn’t keep anything on the shelves. The fincas were producing and reaping