The house at Máximo Gómez 25 witnessed the deliveries of toys, appliances, and bags of food that her sister Emma made with the Crusade of Love, and both the destitute and the political figures of Dominican democracy paraded through there
SANTO DOMINGO.- Although Joaquín Balaguer asked for a modest place with a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor and plenty of space for books, the construction reached 450 square meters, causing the president to joke that they were building him a church, according to Rafael Tomás Hernández R., then assistant to engineer Humberto Ruiz Castillo, advisor to the Executive Branch, in his column “La Máximo Gómez 25”, published in Hoy.
Because he and his son Hugo designed that house, whose construction cost about 30,000 pesos in 1957. It holds stories, intrigues, urban legends and open secrets, from its foundations to the death of the politician and writer in 2002.
The original facade reflected an eclecticism typical of Dominican bourgeois housing in the mid-twentieth century: a sober and modern body, with clean lines, a flat roof and white walls, without much ornamentation, concentrating all its decorative gesture at the entrance.
A rational base with a borrowed historicist fragment, as a mark of social distinction: a semicircular arch framed in light stone and a geometric latticework above a wrought-iron balcony. A Moorish accent, foreign to the rest of the building, which appears in photographs from 1966 and is still retained.
According to Víctor Gómez Bergés, speaking at a roundtable discussion reported by El Nacional, General Guarionex Estrella, Trujillo's chief of military aides, confided in him that the dictator urged Balaguer to move, because his foreign minister could not live in the humble way he did, so he arranged a loan at the Agricultural Bank.
Balaguer moved to an annex above the garage, leaving the main house almost empty, and next door was his library, which he had started in 1944 with a book titled "Emotional Guide to the Romantic City," according to El Granero del Sur.
That was actually the back part, facing Mahatma Gandhi Street, and it had two floors: downstairs, the office where he worked, and the dining room with three armchairs; upstairs, his bedroom, which is still displayed lying flat, with a cross on top, and a living room-library.
Those close to him knew the house better than he did. General Luis María Pérez Bello, his aide-de-camp, and Xiomara Herrera, another assistant, who accompanied him from 1955 until the end, as did Aníbal Páez, who bought the adjacent house and connected it internally to bathe, dress, and feed him.
When his blindness and mobility worsened, Páez slept on a folding bed next to his, and they still argued, according to César Medina in Listín Diario, adding that when Balaguer got angry, "the San Antonios would come out of his office.".
Today, this house is a museum that preserves the sugar bowl on the table from the day of the hemorrhage that landed him in the hospital in 2002, and the stationary bicycle he used to exercise his legs, which were affected by phlebitis. There's also the portrait of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini to whom he prayed every morning, the mahogany handrails installed so he could move around independently in his wheelchair, and the library where Cervantes, Balzac, and Menéndez Pelayo sit alongside the saints that, as he told Hoy, he kept close because they warded off evil spirits.
