slaying, the same type of planning, the same type of execution. I am not given to flippant absurdity: it is no clumsy pun but a bald statement of irredeemable fact. Such a conception is rare nowadays: the grand assassinations are no more, gone with the eloquent, decadent age of the ocean liner, the flying boat and macabre dowagers in mink overcoats and thick cosmetics. Now it is just the bomb and the blitz, the spraying of bullets, the radio-controlled landmine, the random explosions of uncontrolled violence. There is no artistry left, no pride taken in the job, no assiduity, no coolly collected, assimilated deliberation. No real nerve.
Trujillo was a man of habit. He visited his very elderly mother every night at San Cristóbal, thirty-two kilometres from Ciudad Trujillo. They, Antonio and his chums, blocked the road with two cars. Another followed on behind. As the Generalissimo’s vehicle slowed, the men in the car opened fire. From the road-side, the others let rip with machine guns. Or so the report went. The Generalissimo fired back with his personal revolver. His chauffeur returned fire with the two sub-machine guns kept in the car. The chauffeur survived. The assailants were not aiming at the front seat. They were directing their fire exactly at the rear, at the wound-down window, at the single spits of flame which were the target’s handgun.
Once they had felled their target, it was not enough to see him dead. They came out of the cover, kicking his body, smashing it with the butts of their guns, pulverizing his left arm. They dumped his body in the trunk of one of the roadblock cars and drove off to abandon it, in the darkness, with a last look at the bruised, contorted face of the dictator.
What they did was wrong: not the killing, for death can always be justified. It was the mutilation that was wrong. They should have been satisfied with the end of their enemy. It is not a matter of aesthetics or moralities, of political expediency or humanity. It is simply a waste of time.
The dead feel nothing. For them, it is over. For the killers, there is nothing to gain from the beating of a corpse. I can see no pleasure in such actions, no self-justification, although I accept there must be some. It dehumanizes the killers and they abase themselves by such actions. After all, to kill cleanly, exactly, quickly, is such a human action that to bestialize it is to reduce it to mere carnality.
Yet I suppose I can appreciate their reasoning, the hatred which bubbled within them for Trujillo, for what he had done, to which they were opposed.
At least they left the chauffeur, injured and unconscious. They did not beat him, kill him. He was merely a bystander in history’s unfolding tapestry.
That, too, was a mistake. Never leave an involved onlooker. They should become a part of the history they witness. It is their right as much as their lot. To deprive them is to deprive history of another victim.
If you were to tell Europeans it was taboo to urinate against a kapok tree – that by doing so they would release the devil inhabiting the trunk and it would escape, climb up the stream of piss and enter the genitals, rendering them infertile – you would be ridiculed. Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World. It is the stuff of primitive tribes, of head-hunters and face-painters.
Yet, for every supposedly civilized man, death is a taboo. We fear it, abhor it, wonder superstitiously about it. Our religions warn us of it, of the brimstone and flames, of red-tailed demons armed with pitchforks, eager to ensnare us, press us into the pit. As I see it, there is no dybbuk in the kapok tree, nor is there a hell. Death is but a part of a process, inescapable and irrevocable. We live and we die. Once born, these are the only certainties, the only inevitabilities. The only true variable is the timing of the event of death.
It is as pointless to fear death as it is to fear life. We are presented with the
Trujillo was a man of habit. He visited his very elderly mother every night at San Cristóbal, thirty-two kilometres from Ciudad Trujillo. They, Antonio and his chums, blocked the road with two cars. Another followed on behind. As the Generalissimo’s vehicle slowed, the men in the car opened fire. From the road-side, the others let rip with machine guns. Or so the report went. The Generalissimo fired back with his personal revolver. His chauffeur returned fire with the two sub-machine guns kept in the car. The chauffeur survived. The assailants were not aiming at the front seat. They were directing their fire exactly at the rear, at the wound-down window, at the single spits of flame which were the target’s handgun.
Once they had felled their target, it was not enough to see him dead. They came out of the cover, kicking his body, smashing it with the butts of their guns, pulverizing his left arm. They dumped his body in the trunk of one of the roadblock cars and drove off to abandon it, in the darkness, with a last look at the bruised, contorted face of the dictator.
What they did was wrong: not the killing, for death can always be justified. It was the mutilation that was wrong. They should have been satisfied with the end of their enemy. It is not a matter of aesthetics or moralities, of political expediency or humanity. It is simply a waste of time.
The dead feel nothing. For them, it is over. For the killers, there is nothing to gain from the beating of a corpse. I can see no pleasure in such actions, no self-justification, although I accept there must be some. It dehumanizes the killers and they abase themselves by such actions. After all, to kill cleanly, exactly, quickly, is such a human action that to bestialize it is to reduce it to mere carnality.
Yet I suppose I can appreciate their reasoning, the hatred which bubbled within them for Trujillo, for what he had done, to which they were opposed.
At least they left the chauffeur, injured and unconscious. They did not beat him, kill him. He was merely a bystander in history’s unfolding tapestry.
That, too, was a mistake. Never leave an involved onlooker. They should become a part of the history they witness. It is their right as much as their lot. To deprive them is to deprive history of another victim.
If you were to tell Europeans it was taboo to urinate against a kapok tree – that by doing so they would release the devil inhabiting the trunk and it would escape, climb up the stream of piss and enter the genitals, rendering them infertile – you would be ridiculed. Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World. It is the stuff of primitive tribes, of head-hunters and face-painters.
Yet, for every supposedly civilized man, death is a taboo. We fear it, abhor it, wonder superstitiously about it. Our religions warn us of it, of the brimstone and flames, of red-tailed demons armed with pitchforks, eager to ensnare us, press us into the pit. As I see it, there is no dybbuk in the kapok tree, nor is there a hell. Death is but a part of a process, inescapable and irrevocable. We live and we die. Once born, these are the only certainties, the only inevitabilities. The only true variable is the timing of the event of death.
It is as pointless to fear death as it is to fear life. We are presented with the
Similar Books
