From The Last Night

This man has died many times.

It is as if the terror he inflicted for so many years created an irresistible urge to kill him again and again, just to make certain there can be no doubt that he is gone.

And yet he lives.

He lives in every corner of the collective memory. In family stories. In silences. In archives. In photographs. In the things people remember and in the things they refuse to remember.

His first death occurred more than sixty years ago.

I must kill him once more in order to write my story.

On a rainy Tuesday night, I watch the blue Chevrolet carrying Rafael Trujillo toward the final appointment of his life. The dictator does not know that death is already waiting on the road ahead. Or perhaps he knows and simply refuses to believe it.

The advantage of being the author is that I can see everything.

I can delay his death.

I can move it forward.

I can even prevent it.

History says one thing. Memory says another. The archives say something else entirely.

Somewhere between those competing versions lies the novel I have been trying to write.

A novel about a dictator.

A novel about the people who helped create him.

A novel about the stories told after he was gone.

And about the possibility that history itself may be the greatest fiction of all.