Aside from such childish domestic chores, the girl served another purpose for her father: Trujillo spent Flor’s childhood offering different military or political bigwigs the chance to serve as his daughter’s godfather, a singular honor in a Latin family. But he never made the designation official, continually jockeying for a better and more prestigious candidate until the girl was almost fifteen years old and had either to be baptized or to be refused admittance to the French boarding school her father had chosen for her. (To get a sense of Trujillo’s relatively low standing at the time, the lucky winner of this sweepstakes was the family doctor; Flor, for her part, suffered the mortification of being the only baptismal candidate at that particular mass who walked on her own power to the altar rather than be carried as a babe in arms.)
When Trujillo failed to gain custody of the girl upon divorcing her mother, he moved them both to a small house in Santo Domingo and enrolled the adolescent Flor in a nearby boys’ military school. But she soon found herself among the students at the Collège Féminin de Bouffémont, a short distance from Paris.
It wasn’t necessarily a comfortable fit. “Naïve, thin, with legs long as a stork’s, unable to speak French, I was the shy tropical bumpkin,” she remembered, “the classmate of girls who included a princess of Iraq.” There were luxuries: her own thoroughbred horse to replace the burro she rode back home, summer in Biarritz, winter in St. Moritz, regular trips to Paris and the opera, the theater, the museums, and the shops. Still, she felt distant from her father; for most of her life, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, she claimed never to have heard a word from him in all her years away from home.*
Having been transformed, in her own estimation, into “that exotic hybrid, a French-speaking Dominican young lady,” she returned home not sure which father she would be meeting: the one who might hand her a $100 bill and declare “buy some toys” or the one whose volcanic temper aides warned her of in advance of their meetings. “Like the humblest dominicano,” she remembered, “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.”
The pomp of the greeting that summer morning at the port of Santo Domingo must therefore have reassured her, along with her father’s suggestion that she plan a coming-out party for herself, a major social event in a capital that had fallen increasingly under Trujillo’s sway in all its activities. Among those Flor hoped would attend but didn’t dare invite was that dashing lieutenant; years later she confessed, “It was love at first sight.” Eager to learn more about him, she quizzed her one Dominican friend, Lina Lovatón, a tomboy athlete who had been enrolled in the Santo Domingo military school with her. Lina knew little of Porfirio, and nothing further was learned at the party, during the whole of which the aide-de-camp stood stiffly behind the president, this time in proper uniform.
Soon Trujillo announced that the family and his personal staff would pass the rest of the summer at his estate in San José de las Matas in the western foothills of the Cibao. There, the attraction between the two young people escalated, though it would not always be clear in later years how exactly or at whose instigation. Flor would forever insist that they never spoke during this period, but Porfirio would recall idle conversations in French about Parisian landmarks and “the differences between the life one encountered in Europe and in the Caribbean.” That these initial contacts were, at any rate, fleeting they would both agree.
More was, however, suspected. The childless Doña Bienvenida, jealous of Trujillo’s attentions to this daughter of his first marriage, somehow got wind of the fledgling romance—Porfirio surmised that she overheard the two speaking French in the garden one evening—and warned her husband about the lieutenant’s impertinent behavior. Without a moment’s hesitation, Porfirio was reassigned to confined duty at the fortress in San Francisco de Macorís.
Again, what happened next would be in dispute: Either she wrote him to say that she was stricken at the thought of his departure, which assumes his story that they were already on close terms; or he wrote her, out of the blue, if her account of their merely polite relations is more accurate, to express his despair at being separated from her. (Years later, Rubi explained simply, “As in any good script, we found ways of getting letters to each other.”)
Whichever, the next step was indisputably hers. Learning that she would be attending a dance in her honor in Santiago—midway, more or less, between his new post and Trujillo’s ranch—she snuck off on horseback one afternoon and phoned the fortress to invite him. He accepted and, feigning a sore throat and the need to consult a specialist in the city, made his way to Santiago on the day of the dance.
She spied him first in the town plaza, fittingly enough having his boots blacked. Then at the dance, she was seated among the town’s elite when he walked confidently over and asked her to dance. Defying every principle of decorum, they danced together repeatedly—“five times in a row,” as she recalled—and compounded the sensation by speaking in French and then, during the open-air concert following the dance, walking slowly twice around the plaza, albeit under the vigilant eye of her chaperone.
As far as Porfirio was concerned, that was it: “From that moment I was in love, and Flor was as well.”
And that was it as far as Trujillo was concerned as well.
“The dance wasn’t even over when Trujillo heard,” Flor recalled. When she returned to San José de las Matas, she was met with a storm. Her father sent her directly to her room and began grilling his aides to find out who was responsible for the communications between Porfirio and his daughter and who was responsible for letting the banished lieutenant out of the fortress to attend a dance. Flor was terrified by the degree and intensity of his temper and cowered at the door listening as he sputtered to Doña Bienvenida, “She’s gotten herself mixed up with that good-for-nothing lieutenant!”
The next day, an even more dire fate awaited Porfirio: An officer marched into his quarters and announced that he was to be immediately expelled from the army and stripped of all his gear, including, to his special pain, “my uniforms, which I loved so well.”
This was a staggering blow, and he remembered it with high drama: “I was an outcast in my own country. Ignominiously dumped and rejected by the army. Marked on the forehead with the sign of infamy which no one could ignore.” He entertained the thought of exile but he couldn’t leave the island, he said in his most lugubrious voice, because “to leave would be to lose Flor. And to lose Flor would be to die. But to stay would also be to die.”
This was no exaggeration: Trujillo was entirely capable of having his onetime protégé eliminated and, in fact, he dispatched a team of hit men that very afternoon from his goon squad, who roamed the country in ominous red Packards doing the despot’s bidding.
Had he been stationed in any other city, Porfirio might not have survived the day. But San Francisco de Macorís was, of course, his birthplace, as well as the hereditary seat of both sides of his family. “My uncles and my grandfather united in counsel,” he recalled. “My uncle Oscar gave me a well-oiled pistol. A truck was obtained. It took me to a cocoa plantation owned by one of my uncles, Pancho Ariza, about 10 kilometers away.” For more than a week, he hid in an outbuilding on the farm, “staring into space, ruminating on this cascade of catastrophes.”
He was alone in neither his anguish nor his isolation. Before bolting to his hideout, he sent off a note to Flor describing his situation. The emissary who delivered it was tied by Trujillo to a tree and thrashed, while Flor watched in horror. She locked herself away from this frightening tyrant, refusing to speak with him, refusing meals, and writing letter after unsent letter to the young man who had suddenly come to dominate her dreams. Like the heroine of a pulp novel, she would love Porfirio to spite her father.
“Flor