by Jeremy Scott
Flor’s welcome home is warmer than she had feared. Her father, absolute despot of his country, is unpredictable in his moods. The President could be a monster, terrifying in his rage. At other times his face would light up on seeing her, he’d draw her close, embrace her, stroke her hair; press a wad of $100 bills into her hand, urging her to buy toys, clothes, another pony, anything her heart desired.
Today, following the harbour-front reception and back home in the presidential mansion above the town, the President is in unusually benign paternal mode. Pride shows in his face as in his shrill high-pitched voice he examines the daughter who has returned to him no longer a schoolgirl but a young woman, slim, chic, spirited and sexually attractive. He is proud of his possession. Flor is questioned closely on her studies, on the classmates with whom she has passed her vacations, who she has met and connections she has made, on the wealthy and international milieu of which she has become a part.
His interest is more than fatherly. For Trujillo his daughter is an ambassador for the country – a country so obscure that most in the wider world are wholly unaware of it and, if they are, only as a backward slum rotting somewhere among the islands of the Caribbean. Trujillo has a passionate ambition to rebrand that image: to put his country on the map and entice here the beautiful, rich and famous – that glitzy côterie known as Café Society who follow the seasons with their yachts and retinues; to attract capital, investment, development and publicity to the tropical island which he rules as his private fiefdom.
The President is pleased and gratified by all Flor tells him of how she has spent the last two years. He instructs her to throw a lavish party, inviting all her friends.
Her true friends are in France. She canvasses those she knew in the Dominican Republic when she lived here. Some have moved to America – those permitted to do so. Others receive the invitation with unconcealed alarm, explaining that in the interval their families have fallen out of favour and they would not be welcome at the Palace. Some have fathers who have disappeared; their offspring became non-persons, dangerous to know. They, too, cannot come to the occasion. When the evening arrives the guests mainly are children of the generals and colonels composing Trujillo’s staff. Most Flor knows only slightly, many not at all. Only one girl, Lina Lovaton, who had attended the same military school as herself, can really be called a ‘friend’. This is not her party but her father’s. Everything in sight belongs to Him – and even her friendship with Lina will one day be appropriated by the dictator when she becomes his mistress.
The soirée creaks awkwardly into being, stiff, formal and frowsty. In France she has grown used to more sophisticated and vibrant occasions than this; she’d forgotten how dreary such events here were. The tin-pot republic exists in a time warp, governed by antiquated Spanish protocol. Fashion and modern manners have not penetrated this provincial backwater. Her father’s circle of cronies is made up of sycophantic functionaries, with wives who are either frumps or vulgar show-offs, every one of them obese as their husbands. Their children, her peer group, are hicks, the girls graceless and subdued beneath the watchful gaze of their duennas. Only when dancing do their straitjackets loosen to the merengue, native rhythm of the favelas. While it plays their bodies shuck and bump within their starched outmoded dresses, supple in the negro beat… only to freeze when the number ends and, in silence, they return meekly to the custody of their chaperones perched on small gilded chairs around the walls.
As always the President maintains his own space in the large high-ceilinged ballroom, encircled by his cabal and attended by a handful of the personal Guard posed stiffly behind him. Soon after his late arrival when the party is already under way – his appearance signalled by the opening bars of the national anthem while all rise respectfully to their feet – Flor’s glance seeks out the faces of these crisply uniformed youths. And there among them she sees him again, the young officer she’d noticed on the quayside at her arrival. As then, he is staring directly at her. She drops her glance at once… then looks back. For the second time a touche passes between them.
From her few friends at the party Flor ascertains what she can of him, though none of them knows Lieutenant Rubirosa personally. What she learns – from Lina – amplified by what she gleans later, is that he’d been born into a respected and cultured family. His father served as ambassador of the Republic in Paris during the First World War. As an adolescent Rubirosa had been schooled in that city, like her, and he’d remained there after his father had been recalled to the island. However he failed his baccalaureate and was in turn summoned home in some disgrace. Enrolled at the capital’s best law school, he had played polo, boxed and led an active social life during which, at a party at the Country Club, he’d been noticed by Trujillo and summoned to present himself. Rubirosa had been invited to join the great man’s table where, it seemed, he passed the unspoken test, for the following morning he was called to the Palace and given – not offered – a commission as lieutenant in the Presidential Guard… and directed to the President’s own tailor to make his uniform, and to his personal shoemaker for riding boots with spurs – a look Trujillo favoured in the young men he elevated to attend him.
This evening at Flor’s party Lieutenant Rubirosa remains dutifully in his place, close to the person of the Leader. Neither he nor she finds an opportunity to speak to the other.
The heat and humidity in the capital grow intolerable in full summer, when the trade winds cease and not a drop of rain falls for weeks. No breeze stirs in the narrow streets of tottering gingerbread houses where the air lies choked below awnings and overhanging balconies festooned with heavy creeper. Mules’ hooves clop against the cobbles, shouts and cries bounce off bare walls and tiled floors. The uproar never ceases: carts, motors and horns, children and stray dogs. Doors and windows stand open to the street, Mexican music crackling from the radio in every house along with the smell of sweat and old clothes, cooking goat’s meat and the fume of charcoal.
Ninety-eight per cent of the population remains trapped by poverty in their steaming barrios, but those who can escape the city. The President removes his family and entourage (including Rubirosa) to his country estate. There Flor rides out on her thoroughbred Arab stallion, accompanied by a groom, and passes the rest of the time in decorous idleness, watched over either by family or a duenna.
But ‘as in a good script, we found ways’, Rubirosa will explain later. More was communicated by glance than word, though once the two were caught speaking together in French by Dona Bienvenida, Flor’s spiteful stepmother, who had replaced her own mother as the dictator’s wife. She reported the incident to her husband. Trujillo was livid, his reaction immediate. Rubirosa was banished to duty at the military fortress of San Francisco de Macoris, where he was restricted to barracks.
So the two undeclared lovers find themselves separated in the traditional predicament of medieval romance – which they solve as young lovers have always solved, by ingenuity, subterfuge and smuggled notes.
A ball is due to be staged by the municipality in the town of Santiago. It is usual for local governors to seize on any opportunity to curry favour with the President, and it is clear to all that his daughter is destined for a starring role in the country’s affairs. The prospect of a suburban repetition of her earlier lacklustre dance fills Flor with gloom, but it provides an opportunity. Though it is hard to find privacy to make the call, she telephones Lieutenant Rubirosa at the fortress to invite him.
A few days later, after improvising an appointment with a medical specialist, he comes to the ball. There he approaches Flor, bows, and asks her to dance. They dance… and continue to do so for five numbers in a row, observed by countless eyes while tongues wag. And it is noted that this is not the limit to the young man’s audacity. Taking time out, the two stroll together in public beneath the lit-up trees of the town’s dusty plaza, animatedly talking together in French. ‘From that moment,’ Rubirosa says, ‘I was in love, and Flor as well.’
Informers are everywhere, part of the system; denunciation forms a recognised method of self-advancement. Even before the ball ends, the President is apprised of what had taken place. What impudence!
Vengeance is swift. Next day Rubirosa’s sword and revolver are taken from him, he is stripped of his uniforms and expelled from the army. On the instant he becomes a non-person, and he knows this is not the end of it. The President is notorious in his wrath towards those who displease him. A gang of psychos and thugs lurk close to hand, prepared to torture, maim or kill to fulfil his whim, adept in the refined barbarities of their calling.
Rubirosa knows that his life is under threat. He considers escaping from the island, ‘but to leave would be to lose Flor. And to lose Flor would be to die. But to stay would also be to die.’ Dispatching a note to her, he borrows a pistol and hides out in the stables on one of his uncle’s plantations.
His note to Flor is intercepted and carried to the President, its bearer tied to a palm tree in the garden and whipped before Flor’s eyes. Appalled, she locks herself in her room, rejects meals, and refuses to see or speak to her father. An aide is sent to reason with her, but she is implacable. ‘Tell my father that I want to marry the man I love, and I will marry him. Otherwise I would not be worthy of being his daughter.’
Meanwhile Rubirosa’s mother, fearful for her son’s life, seeks an audience with Trujillo and goes to plead for him. Cautiously, in a tone designed not to rile him, she points out that the family are respectable and loyal. Her husband had served his country honourably and with distinction throughout his career. Where was the shame if Lieutenant Rubirosa has asked the great man’s daughter to dance, accompanied her on a passade around the town square? Where was the affront to Him if the young couple had fallen in love?
Perhaps it is Dona Ana’s sincerity, perhaps Trujillo’s intuition this personable youth could prove of use to him, perhaps a flicker of concern for his daughter’s happiness, just possibly the remembrance that he too had once been young and ardent; more likely though on that particular morning his Furies are not with him. Whatever the explanation, the President does not hear out the mother’s plea. ‘Enough!’ he shouts, and his fist slams the surface of the desk. ‘That’s enough! They will marry right away.’
The origins of Presidente Rafael Trujillo were veiled by the spin of myth to have become legend, for to the inhabitants of the island he stood on a par with God; his banner bore witness to their twin omnipotence. But to an impoverished, illiterate, provincial population gossip is the stuff of life, and the facts – though seldom and only furtively discussed – were available to all. His grandfather was a Spanish policeman stationed on the island, whose illegitimate son spawned a litter of eleven children, one of them Rafael.
How far the boy’s nature was shaped by deprivation and abuse, by lack of education or redemptive role model is impossible to say. After reviewing his career it is natural to conclude he was born a brutal thug. The dark was present in him at his nativity and later would expand until it possessed him. He showed street savvy from the start, joining a gang of hoods named ‘The 44’ on reaching his teens. Short, wide and hard, he became an enforcer, using blackmail, violence and terror to collect. Not that he often had to employ such tactics. He had a presence, a menace that induced others to yield. He was working as a telegraph operator for $25 a month when he married the peasant woman who would become Flor’s mother. Poor, their worldly wealth amounted to one burro stabled in the garden of their palm-thatched house, but Trujillo had a keen sense of appearance. He owned only two white suits, but his wife spent much of her time washing and pressing them. Soon he became a security guard on a sugar plantation and in the role acquired a taste both for uniform and tyranny.
At this time, just after the Great War, America was an imperial world power who had colonised – a word never uttered – several islands in the Caribbean. Santa Domingo was occupied by a military force of US Marines. The exemplary manner in which Rafael Trujillo imposed discipline on a disaffected rabble labouring on a plantation in near-slave conditions under the heat of the sun became known to the military authorities. He was effective, ‘without scruples’, it was noted with approval. He sounded like a useful man, the sort they were looking for. In 1918 he was awarded a commission in the National Guard, which was officered by marines. Readily allying himself with the occupying power, his ascent up the ranks was swift. When US forces finally quit the island in 1924 Trujillo had risen to command of the National Army. Six years later he led a coup against President Vasquez, installing himself in the become-vacant office. Soon after, the island’s capital, Santa Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo and that crucial year of 1930 inaugurating his regime was designated Year One of the new republic.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rafael Trujillo and his wife
With his meaty hand slamming down explosively upon the desk the President had issued his decree: Enough! They will marry right away!
Never could he reverse his decisions, for to do so would be to show weakness, but afterwards and not for the first time he wishes back the consequences of his impetuous edict. Behind the implacable façade lurks a man of passion whose violence is barely held in check. He feels toward his first-born daughter a fierce possessive love. She is his own flesh, the child that he has made, not just biologically but by taking charge of her upbringing after divorcing her mother, sending Flor to board at military school at the age of nine. There she learned discipline and obedience while remaining wholly dependent upon Him.
Call it masochism, my slave-blood psychology coming out, but I had to submit to Trujillo’s will. For in my tangled emotions he was not only papá, cajoling, demanding, ordering, for whose love I thirsted insatiably – perhaps above my husband’s – but the demigod Generalissimo Trujillo, bizarre, fateful, omnipotent. Like the humblest Dominicano I prospered and suffered under his rule and came to think of him as immortal. I had succumbed to the Dominican neurosis, a willingness to swallow anything because it came from Trujillo.
Papa was God, didn’t the two receive equal billing? He had fashioned her from the start and at fifteen dispatched her to finishing school in France to polish his creation. Yet the creature was not made in his own likeness, but rather its opposite. Crassly ignorant himself, coarse, unravelled, unsophisticated, deficient in all the graces, he has a clear picture of how he wants her to be.
What Trujillo desires for his daughter and his ambitions for his country are the same. The island that forms his fiefdom is a feculent midden, the population subsisting on one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. He intends to transform the place into an international destination rivalling Venice or Monte Carlo, a luxurious world-class resort for the rich and famous. Through personal determination alone he will impose the appearance if not the structure of modernity upon the capital and adjacent coast. Santa Domingo will become a favoured luxury watering hole and playground for the cosmopolitan smart set. And his daughter will become the symbol to the world of this brave new republic, elegant, smart, high-toned, above all modern; the epitome of chic and style.
That was Trujillo’s intention, which he’d never doubted he could achieve. He could impose his will on others, why not upon Flor, his creation? It had not entered his mind that in the process of European grooming the creature would gain a will of its own or a taste for freedom and independence, a teenager’s urge to rebel.
The President is used to dealing with those who oppose him: he has them taken care of. To have Flor dealt with in the same way is inappropriate and counter to his feeling for her. And to have Rubi banished or disposed of would alienate her beyond recall; it would make her his enemy so she too would have to be dealt with in her turn.
Thus it was that upon this occasion on the murky battlefield of the dictator’s mind Love won over Death – but this is still relatively early in his career during which, later, Death will prove always to be the safer option.
But the President is displeased, and when He is vexed those around
him tiptoe in mortal terror, frantic to avoid his path. From the day he announces they will be married, he severs contact with the young couple. He is icy in his detachment, refusing to address one word to either.
Meanwhile he takes charge of every aspect of their forthcoming wedding: orchestration of the splendid ceremony, briefing the Archbishop, the wording of the invitations, the guest list and the lavish reception afterward. The President will give away the bride, still attached to him by an invisible chain. Rubi’s best man will be the American ambassador, Arthur Shoenfeld, whom he’s never met but who represents the new republic’s patron, the US. A strategic relationship which well suits the State Department; Trujillo may be a monster but he is their monster.
The nuptials are set, the details are decided and the country’s leading newspaper, Listin Diario, records that ‘the genteel couple have united their pulsing hearts in emotion’ and announces ‘the most aristocratic wedding ever recorded in the social annals of the Republic’.
For the genteel couple themselves all this comes as something of a shock. As Flor puts it, ‘Five dances in a row, two circles around a park, an innocent flirtation, and I was to marry a man I scarcely knew.’
The pair’s chaste incipient romance has jumped fast forward into a situation neither had planned or contemplated, far less discussed. There has been no opportunity to talk, or gain knowledge of the other’s past or flesh. Supervision over them has been constant. The two are strangers, designated partners in an arranged marriage.
For Flor this dalliance with Rubi had originated as a gesture of defiance to her father, a statement of independence. Rubi had happened to be standing in the right place at the right time, wearing a uniform in which most males look their swaggering best. It was very easy for women – now and later – to fall for the image of Rubi. Dark, handsome, slender and erect, he looked the part. On sighting him Flor had developed an instant crush – many women would later do the same.
