Chiste apocalyptus

Not four weeks after the party, Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral was arrested by the Secret Police. The charge? ‘Slander and gross calumny against the Person of the President’.

If the stories are to be believed, it all had to do with a joke.

One afternoon, so the story goes, shortly after the fateful party, Abelard, who we had better reveal was a short, bearded, heavyset man with surprising physical strength and curious, closeset eyes, drove into Santiago in his old Packard to buy a bureau for his wife (and of course to see his mistress). He was still a mess, and those who saw him that day recall his disheveled appearance. His distraction. The bureau was successfully acquired and lashed haphazardly to the roof of the automobile, but before he could shoot over to Lydia’s crib Abelard was buttonholed by some ‘buddies’ on the street and invited for a few drinks at Club Santiago. Who knows why he went? Maybe to try to keep up appearances, or because every invitation felt like a life-or-death affair. That night at Club Santiago he tried to shake off his sense of imminent doom by talking vigorously about history, medicine, Aristophanes, by getting very very drunk, and when the night wound down he asked the ‘boys’ for assistance in relocating the bureau to the trunk of his Packard. He did not trust the valets, he explained, for they had stupid hands. The muchachos good-naturedly agreed. But while Abelard was fumbling with the keys to open the trunk he stated loudly, I hope there aren’t any bodies in here. That he made the foregoing remark is not debated. Abelard conceded as much in his ‘confession’. This trunk-joke in itself caused discomfort among the ‘boys,’ who were all too aware of the shadow that the Packard automobile casts on Dominican history: It was the car in which Trujillo had, in his early years, terrorized his first two elections away from the pueblo. During the Hurricane of 1931 the Jefe’s henchmen often drove their Packards to the bonfires where the volunteers were burning the dead, and out of their trunks they would pull out ‘victims of the hurricane’. All of whom looked strangely dry and were often clutching opposition party materials. The wind, the henchmen would joke, drove a bullet straight through the head of this one. Har-har!

What followed is still, to this day, hotly disputed. There are those who swear on their mothers that when Abelard finally opened the trunk he poked his head inside and said, Nope, no bodies here. This is what Abelard himself claimed to have said. A poor joke, certainly, but not ‘slander’ or ‘gross calumny’. In Abelard’s version of the events, his friends laughed, the bureau was secured, and off he drove to his Santiago apartment, where Lydia was waiting for him (forty-two and still lovely and still worried shitless about his daughter). The court officers and their hidden ‘witnesses,’ however, argued that something quite different happened, that when Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral opened the trunk of the Packard, he said, Nope, no bodies here, Trujillo must have cleaned them out for me.

End quote.

IN MY HUMBLE OPINION

I t sounds like the most unlikely load of jiringonza on this side of the Sierra Madre. But one man’s jiringonza is another man’s life.