At least that would be how Porfirio remembered it—or maybe how he imagined it. Flor’s memory was different: a cruelly imposed isolation; the ceaseless slander of the former lieutenant by her father and stepmother; a strange limbo, like being a nonperson.
In his hideaway, Porfirio grew impatient and decided, on instinct, that danger had passed. “It has always been one of my chief principles,” he later confessed. “I will risk everything to avoid being bored.” He rode back to his uncle’s home in town, shocking his family with his sudden appearance. “You don’t have a lick of common sense,” they admonished him.
But, in fact, the worst of it seemed to have passed. Indeed, the lull emboldened Doña Ana Rubirosa to visit Trujillo to plead for her son. As Porfirio recalled it, his mother stood up to the president by asking, “What secret mark is there against our family that Señor Trujillo cannot tolerate that a Rubirosa would dare put his eyes on his daughter?”
The meeting was barely a quarter hour along when Trujillo slapped his desk and declared, “That’s enough! They will marry right away!”
This was like tripping over a winning lottery ticket on the street. From disgrace and near-death, Porfirio was now slated to marry into the first family of the country. Maybe he was in love, truly, or maybe he was too scared to cross Trujillo a second time by refusing Flor, or maybe he was as bold a tíguere as the Benefactor himself. Whichever, he had heedlessly reached for the impossible by making eyes at the president’s daughter and, through charm, gall, and luck, had seized the prize. At twenty-three, he would be wealthier and closer to power than Don Pedro ever had been.
For Flor it was a stunning shock: “Five dances in a row, two circles around a park, an innocent flirtation, and I was to marry a man I scarcely knew!”
Still, marriage would liberate her, she hoped, from a man she knew all too well; as she admitted, she was “wild to leave my prison, to run like hell from Father, an instinct that was to propel me all my life.”
The nuptials were planned for early December at the fateful ranch house where the abortive courtship transpired. Trujillo orchestrated all the details: the invitations, the ceremony, the party. The best man would be the U.S. ambassador, H. F. Arthur Schoenfeld, whom the groom had likely never met. The ceremony would be performed by the archbishop of Santo Domingo. Flor was sent to the capital to have a dress made; her fiancé stayed with his family in San Francisco de Macorís—and was named, if only for the sake of having a title worthy of his entry into the president’s family, secretary to the Dominican legation in London.
On December 2, a caravan of trucks bearing flowers and bridesmaids wended from the capital to the wedding site. The groom was flown in on a military plane. The next day, after the civil and religious ceremonies in the town, the wedding party began late, at 4:30, on what turned out to be a rainy afternoon.
In the photographs of their wedding day, the newlyweds look frightened and tiny, despite their finery and the attendant pomp. Rubi stands with shoulders thrust back and tiny waist forward, a pompadour stiff on his head and a grin set in the baby fat of his cheeks. Flor is a head shorter, with wide-set eyes and a toothy smile; she holds a hand protectively across her breast, cradling her bouquet. They might be a prom couple on their first date.
As the photo attests, the wedding wasn’t a completely comfortable experience for the groom, who hadn’t once laid eyes on his prospective father-in-law since before being sent away for flirting with Flor. “During the ceremony,” he recalled, “I saw Trujillo again for the first time. Instead of his happy air, he was cold and quiet.” Nor was the bride entirely at ease, recalling that “Father hadn’t spoken to me since my engagement.”
But it was a lavish celebration nonetheless, with music, champagne, food, dignitaries, and a trove of gifts, which the bride said “would have filled a house.” (Conspicuously absent was the bride’s mother, still shunned by Trujillo as if dead.) By 7 P.M., the newlyweds were headed to Santo Domingo in one of their presents from the Benefactor, a cream-colored, chauffeur-driven Packard with their initials embossed in real gold on the doors.
Two days later, the capital’s most prestigious newspaper, Listín Diario, carried an account of the wedding written by someone whom the editors referred to as “an esteemed and distinguished friend of ours.” The author was, in fact, Trujillo, who would employ this and other newspapers throughout the tenure of his reign to carry, pseudonymously, compositions of his own, often using them to undermine or frankly smear someone who had fallen out of his favor. He could be vicious and snide in his writings, but this time, his tone was florid and precious:
Distinguished personalities of the country added to the glow of the nuptial ceremony … beneath the cool pines of the marvelous setting of San José de las Matas, an ambiance rich in exquisiteness.… The bride, who is a flower because of her perfumed name and because of the charms that flower within her, lit up a precious wedding dress.… It was one of the most aristocratic weddings ever recorded in the social annals of the Republic. The genteel couple have united their pulsing hearts in emotion. They have our most sincere and cordial wishes for their personal journey and their eternal happiness.
According to the report, the couple would live in “a handsome chalet within the bounds of the presidential mansion in the aristocratic and comely ‘faubourg’ of Gascue” in Santo Domingo—another gift from Trujillo.
But it was to a temporary home they retired that evening, their first as husband and wife and another experience that they would remember differently.
“When we left for our honeymoon,” Porfirio remembered, “I felt like the happiest of all men.”
Flor, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck. However much she had talked with her mother, her stepmother, or her older friends, she was entirely unprepared for the night’s activities. She wore a pink negligee into the bedroom and was startled into apoplexy by the sight of her husband’s erection. “I ran all around the house, and Porfirio chased me,” she remembered.
Somehow she talked him out of consummating the marriage that night, but she couldn’t keep him at bay forever. She let him have his way, however awfully. “I didn’t like it because I bled so much, and my clothes were ruined,” she confessed. “In time, he began to make love to me in different ways, but when it was over my insides hurt a lot. He was such a handsome boy and so charming that I let him do whatever he wanted. But he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored.”
Et voilà the maiden marital bed of a man who would become famous as one of the great lovers of his time.
* A legend would evolve that the two men met after Porfirio had captained the Dominican national polo team to a victory over Nicaragua, but Porfirio’s equestrian life only truly began after he met Trujillo, and polo wasn’t played in the Dominican Republic, certainly not at the international level, until the 1940s, when he was himself instrumental in introducing it.
* Among the surviving correspondence was a letter from Flor de Oro at Bouffémont dated October 29, 1931, in which she thanked her father for his recent telegram and declared that she was looking forward to the fulfillment of his promise to bring her home for the coming summer. He responded three weeks later with a thoughtful and tender note in which he praised her maturation and indicated that he’d heard good things about her academic progress from the headmistress of her school.
A DREDGE AND A BOTCH AND A BUST-UP
It was, by all objective standards, easy street.
In