But there was a surprise coming: Hard on that admonition, Trujillo gently suggested that Porfirio meet him at the National Palace the next morning to discuss his future, say 10 A.M. The matter agreed, the older man stood and, begging pardon, left the club, but not without a final invitation: “Sit here with your friends. Tonight you are the guests of the President!” Porfirio waved his chums over and they joined the soldiers, who slackened their rigid posture when Trujillo left and drank brandy and champagne with the young men until the early morning hours.
He returned home and prepared for his meeting, his head heavy from the night’s indulgences. At the palace, he found Trujillo characteristically alert, erect, immaculate, and direct.
“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”
“Thanks to you, Mr. President.”
“Very good. Now let’s get to more serious matters. I am going to make you a lieutenant in my Presidential Guard.”
There was no time—or, indeed, reason—for retort. Trujillo immediately sent a lackey to fetch an administrative official, to whom he announced, “I have just named Señor Rubirosa a lieutenant. I want to see him in uniform immediately. Take him to my personal tailor, my shoemaker and my gunsmith. Tonight he’ll enter the military training academy.”
As he was outfitted in the splendor that Trujillo demanded for himself and those closest to him, Porfirio tried to wrap his mind around the situation. “At 22,” he admitted, “this was a windfall … I was sufficiently vain to believe that my personality and the name of my family had occasioned this treatment by the General.” But he managed as well to plumb Trujillo’s deeper motives. Addicted to gossip—especially as a means of dominating its subjects—Trujillo had heard about Don Pedro’s popular boy-about-town and determined to use the young man’s social standing for his own purposes. Porfirio understood it instinctively: “He had resolved to get the golden youth of the island involved in the reform of his army. I seemed a young man well suited for this plan because of the prestige of my father and the esteem that my Parisian education had among young men of my generation.”
At heart, he understood Trujillo because the two were cut of the same material: “The General was a tíguere,” he recollected, “crueler than any of the other tígueres Santo Domingo had known before. This tíguere was smarter than a fox.” In time, their relationship would evolve into a complete symbiosis. Trujillo, capable of the most ruthless acts, would pass virtually all his life in the Dominican Republic to keep his iron fist on its affairs, would commit the most ruthless acts of violence and immorality to suit his pleasure and his power, but would always take especial care to maintain at least a show of public decency. Porfirio, who would eventually emerge as his country’s most visible emissary to the outside world, habitually engaged in a more extroverted and sensational form of tíguerismo, based not on the ruthless wielding of fear but on suavity, dash, ambition, charm, and magnetism. He would provide the sophisticated public face of a brutal regime while Trujillo would, in turn, provide a steely foundation for his stupendous adventures—a mutuality that Trujillo seemed almost to have planned from the start.
It began when, hung over and greedy, Porfirio swallowed the bait dangled before him, allowing yet another of the older man’s schemes to unfold exactly as it had been planned. “Just as Trujillo imagined,” he confessed, “many young men of the Dominican upper classes followed me.”
He didn’t care if he was being used. Military life, contrary to expectations, appealed to him. As he would recall, “Physical efforts filled our days: calisthenics, various sports, arms training, target practice, horseback riding. For a young man like me, it was paradise.” It was made for him: the smart, elaborate uniforms, the camaraderie of fellow junior officers, the freedom from the responsibility to feed or house himself or define his days.
He loved his uniforms, and he looked brilliant in them: pinch-waisted, sharp-jawed, muscular, whippy, with a tight crown of wavy hair, a broad forehead, dark almond-shaped eyes, wide cheekbones, and that café au lait complexion. He wore his hair longer than other soldiers and his boots were more suited to gentlemanly pursuits than to combat or training. If the elite society of Santo Domingo wasn’t yet prepared to accept Trujillo and his military, there were certainly young ladies whose eyes, and more, would readily be caught by the spectacle of this handsome, cultured young officer. He was in his glory.
His golden impression of his new life wasn’t shared at home. His brother-in-law asserted his domain over the household by refusing to allow a soldier to live under his roof. Porfirio simply moved into the barracks.
As a young soldier, he didn’t necessarily comport himself according to the strict standards of self-control that were so important to Trujillo. Having been promoted to first lieutenant and named a member of Trujillo’s personal staff, Porfirio was required to attend all of the deadly dull affairs of protocol of which the president was so enamored. Among these was a formal ball that would be attended by all of the civilian elite of Santo Domingo, a company by whom Porfirio was loathe to be seen in the role of aide-de-camp, a mere lackey. Ordered to attend in dress whites, he showed up instead in khakis, declaring that he hadn’t been told about the day’s dress code until it was too late and that his formal uniform was in the laundry. (“I still recall the look Trujillo gave me,” he would say more than thirty years later.)
With the other junior officers, Porfirio was ordered to stay put behind Trujillo, but he boldly strode over to where a young woman he knew was seated, and he took a chair beside her to chat. A nervous senior officer approached.
“Are you Lieutenant Rubirosa?”
“Yes.”
“The President has sent me to tell you that you may dance if you wish.”
The rest of Trujillo’s military corps gaped in astonishment as Porfirio enjoyed champagne and the company of the ladies for the rest of the evening. They had reckoned he’d be lambasted; instead, he had the time of his life.
That close call with the president’s anger wasn’t quite enough to scare Porfirio into the straight and narrow that was becoming the norm for trujillistos, as the most ardent followers of the president were known. In May 1932, he injured his knee in a one-car accident in San Pedro de Macorís, thirty miles east of Santo Domingo: As if he didn’t care how he’d comported himself he’d been speeding. “The distinguished young military gentleman,” as a fawning newspaper account referred to him, was attended in a local hospital and then transported by ambulance to the capital where he was seen by top military doctors. “The injury doesn’t apparently require additional care,” the report continued. “We are happy to wish him the quickest and most complete recovery.”
His first smash-up!
In July, Trujillo told Porfirio that his presence would be required the following day at the harbor, where a full complement of officers and a military band would greet the arrival of a ship that was returning the president’s daughter, Flor de Oro, from two years of school in France. Trujillo had special need for his audacious, French-speaking aide-de-camp at this particular reunion. “She knows Paris like you do,” he explained. And then, after a pause, he added, “Well, really, not like you do, I would hope.…”
The seventeen-year-old girl who got off that boat was, as she would later remember, “bedazzled” by her reception. “ ‘El Supremo,’” as she referred to her father, “stood there in an immaculate, starched white-linen suit, flanked by shining limousines and his handpicked aides. I noticed one lieutenant instantly—handsome in a Dominican uniform that had a special flair. Even the gold buttons looked real.”
It was, of course, Porfirio. And he, of course, noticed her noticing. “She was enchanting, with dreamy eyes and hair as black as night,” he later recollected in the florid style that overcame him when he wrote of romance.
No words were