Free The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

one’s coming straight toward us,” said Antonio de la Maza, raising the sawed-off barrel to the window, ready to fire.
    Amadito and Estrella Sadhalá gripped their weapons too. Antonio Imbert started the engine. But the car coming down the Malecón toward them, moving slowly, on the lookout, wasn’t the Chevrolet but a small Volkswagen. Using its brakes, until the driver saw them. Then it made a U-turn and drove to where they were parked. It stopped beside them, its headlights off.

4
    “Aren’t you going up to see him?” The nurse says at last.
    Urania knows the question has been struggling to pass the woman’s lips ever since she came into the little house on César Nicolás Penson, but instead of asking the nurse to take her to Señor Cabral’s room, she went to the kitchen and fixed herself some coffee. She has been sipping it for the past ten minutes.
    “First I’ll finish my breakfast,” she answers, not smiling, and the nurse lowers her eyes in confusion. “I need strength to climb those stairs.”
    “I know there was trouble between you and him, I heard something about it,” the woman apologizes, not knowing what to do with her hands. “I was just asking. I already gave him his breakfast and shaved him. He always wakes up very early.”
    Urania nods. She feels calm and confident now. Again she examines the decay around her. The paint on the walls has deteriorated, and the tabletop, the sink, the cupboard, everything looks smaller and misaligned. Was it the same furniture? She didn’t recognize anything.
    “Does anyone come to visit him? Anybody in the family, I mean.”
    “Señora Adelina’s daughters, Señora Lucindita and Señora Manolita, always come about noon.” The woman—tall, no longer young, wearing slacks under her white uniform—stands in the kitchen doorway and does not hide her discomfort. “Your aunt used to come every day. But since she broke her hip, she doesn’t go out anymore.”
    Aunt Adelina was a good deal younger than her father, she couldn’t be more than seventy-five. So she broke her hip. Was she still so devout? She took communion every day, back then.
    “Is he in his bedroom?” Urania drinks the last of her coffee. “Well, where else would he be? No, don’t come up with me.”
    She climbs the staircase with the discolored railing where, she remembers, pots filled with flowers used to hang, and she can’t shake the feeling that the house has shrunk. When she reaches the upper floor, she notices the chipped tiles, some of them loose. This had been a modern house, comfortable, furnished with taste; it has fallen on hard times, it’s a hovel compared to the houses and condominiums she saw the night before in Bella Vista. She stops at the first door—this used to be his room—and before she goes in, she knocks a couple of times.
    She is greeted by intense light that pours through the wide-open window. The glare blinds her for a few seconds; then she begins to make out the bed covered by a gray spread, the old bureau with its oval mirror, the photographs on the walls—how did he get hold of her graduation picture from Harvard?—and, finally, in the old leather chair with its broad back and arms, an old man in blue pajamas and slippers. He looks dwarfed by the chair. He has grown wrinkled and smaller, just like the house. She is distracted by a white object at her father’s feet, a small chamber pot, half filled with urine.
    Back then his hair was black except for some distinguished gray at his temples; now the sparse hairs on his bald head are yellowish, dirty. His eyes were large, sure of themselves, masters of the world (when he wasn’t near the Chief); but these two slits staring at her are tiny, beady, frightened. He had teeth and now he doesn’t; he can’t be wearing his dentures (she paid the bill for them a few years ago), because his lips have collapsed and his cheeks are so sunken they almost touch. He has shriveled, his feet barely touch the floor.