Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Feast of the Goat: A Novel
    The Feast of the Goat: A Novel
    The Feast of the Goat: A Novel
    Ebook584 pages10 hours

    The Feast of the Goat: A Novel

    By Mario Vargas Llosa and Edith Grossman

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

    In The Feast of the Goat, this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

    Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.

    "A fierce, edgy and enthralling book ... Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in doing so has written a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance."--The New York Times

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 4, 2011
    ISBN9781429921787
    The Feast of the Goat: A Novel
    Author

    Mario Vargas Llosa

    Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He has also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG.

    Read more from Mario Vargas Llosa

    Related to The Feast of the Goat

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Find A New Home For Your Hauntings

      Oct 1, 2020

      Dark Moon Books editorial team promotes dark fiction by publishing multi-author anthologies and single author collections plus the occasional novel. They want ‘unusual and invigorating dark fiction’ which is ‘experimental, innovative, or progressive…

      1 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Blackcurrants

      Jan 15, 2024

      Blackcurrants
      4 min read

    • Article

      There Is No Crime Here

      Jul 18, 2023

      There Is No Crime Here
      5 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jul 1, 2019

      We know the rain must comebut it holds its wet tonguein the sky. We aren’t childrenso mom doesn’t call and we don’tout stay the night playing in halosof streetlights. We lock ourselves indoorswith screens. The air electric.We don’t even corner a bott

      1 min read

    • Article

      Sarah Baxter Stranded in Peru

      Jun 25, 2020

      After ten days of trekking and a couple of Cusqueña beers, I was spark out in my hotel room when the telephone rang. Nothing made much sense, as things don’t when you’re jerked from sound sleep. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, the lady on the other en

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Try Not to Die

      Jan 5, 2021

      Try Not to Die
      3 min read

    • Article

      Death

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kids already asleep, the grownups sit out on the deck,a few empty cans, an open bottle of wine on the table, I’m sure, and stacked paper plates with half-eaten buns and dirty napkins.From my backyard next door, I can hear them, the living, chatting.

      3 min read

    • Article

      An Open Palm

      Apr 14, 2022

      An Open Palm
      10 min read

    • Article

      Personal Space

      Mar 29, 2020

      Ten years ago, almost to the day, my father died without warning. He was getting off a plane in Sydney. I was 22 and living in the south of Spain at the time, a place where my biggest qualms were whether the orange juice was pre-squeezed, or if my br

      6 min read

    • Article

      Splash

      Feb 9, 2018

      Splash
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Feast of the Goat

    4/5

    670 ratings42 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Great historical fiction set in the violent reign of Trujillo. Alternating chapters tell the story of a woman returning to her home in the Dominican Republic to see her dying father whom she hates. The reader is not sure why she hates her father so much until the ending of the book, but she has valid reason.The other chapters tell of the conspirators who assassinate Trujillo and the consequences for each of them. Some are honored, some are killed, some lose their will, and others disappear. There is much history here accurately told. The character of Trujillo is chilling; he was man who did bring prosperity to the nation, but demanded the absolute loyalty from those around him. Those around him were tested constantly to prove their loyalty. The family of Trujillo is spoiled, violent, and equally as demanding. The story caused me to research many of the characters portrayed and the information about them is almost stranger than fiction could be. The writing to this is engaging and it is a great example of the best of historical fiction.The Latin names are often confusing; however, as they are not always referred to by the same name--sometimes a title, sometimes a nickname, etc. However, a great read.
    • 4/5
      Here's the blurb on the cover of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat: 'The Feast of the Goat' will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's twentieth century and deprives One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title.'--Times Literary Supplement.And there went the fifth star. Llosa and Garcia Marquez were notable literary antagonists, Marquez being an egalitarian, Llosa a classical neo-liberal type. Their feud made uncomfortable reading for those who had read Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral, which begins with the question, more or less: At what precise moment did Peru fuck itself up. It's a masterpiece of literary rule violations, intertwining numerous conversations, one which consists of but a few exchanges that sometimes require the reader to recall the previous statement after nearly 100 pages--and yet Llosa pulled it off. The book is one that teaches you how to read it. And it's a compelling read as well, requiring little more than an interest in language to gain and maintain access. If any book by Llosa is on a par with 100 Year, it's Conversation in the Cathedral. And not so long after that, Llosa hatched The War of the End of the World, based on a bizarre yet emblematic rebellion and reprisal toward the end of the 19th century that gave rise to what is considered Brazil's national epic, 'Os Sertoes', or The Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. A work of elastic realism, the book is a stunning re-creation of the strange menagerie at the center of the rebellion.Now I am asked to admire the virtuosity of The Feast of the Goat. I don't. I find it's plot, centered around the assassination of The Dominican Republic's dictator Trujillo in 1961, irresistible, and the blending of narratives competent, five steps back from Conversation in the Cathedral, but competent. Most importantly, I find the book to be a fairly exhaustive portrayal of a dictatorship and the way it permeates a society, destroying the will of the people, the very yearning for independent thought and action, the irreparable damage to an entire nation's psyches and emotional lives. This is the last serious work of a great novelist, so it is not surprising that the portrayal of the dictator and his lackeys is fine, that the portrayal of the assassins is compelling, and even that he pulls off the most important task he set himself, making powerful and real the contemporary character whose return to the Dominican after a 35 year absence generates the stories in the book. Where Llosa failed, he did not attempt, so it would be unfair to charge the book with that failure, but it does reduce the importance of the book. The book has every opportunity to portray the lives of the poor, the lumpenproles--particularly those hired by the Dominican secret service to terrify the populace--yet Llosa set his standards somewhat lower, and rather than a great book that would have rivalled his two best he has written a book worth reading mostly for its political historical aspect. I recommend the book, but not the cover.
    • 5/5
      Suspenseful historical fiction about dictator, Trujillo of Dominican Republic. Told through eyes of several characters: the assassins and daughter of a cabinet member.
    • 5/5
      An awesome read about the history of a brutal dictatorship.
    • 3/5
      More history than fiction, unsettling description of a terror state, well written and surprisingly easy to follow despite the constant change of focus and time frames, even in the same sentence. However the fictional heroine's secret was, perhaps intentionally, very predictable from the beginning and I lost interest after the assassination with all the back and forth of each of the conspirators' flight, capture and mostly violent death. As for all the descriptions of torture, although I am sure they are accurate, I am not certain what purpose they serve, in such repetition and detail.
    • 4/5
      Historical fiction about the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic. It utilizes three storylines, including flashbacks and flash-forwards, to tell the story of this oppressive regime and its aftermath. It opens in 1996, with Urania Cabral, daughter of a (fictional) former supporter of Trujillo. At age 49, she has returned after thirty-five years in the US. She eventually reveals the reason for her lengthy absence. The second storyline covers the last day of Trujillo’s life. It portrays the dictator and his devotees and provides the historic content of Trujillo’s power base. The third story involves the group of assassins awaiting arrival of Trujillo’s chauffeured car. It covers how they became disillusioned and what drove them to decide to kill “the Goat.”

      This book portrays abuse of power and the lingering psychological impact on the people who lived through it. Though the Cabral family is fictional, Trujillo and his assassins were real people, and the descriptions of events are based on what actually occurred. Their thoughts, of course, are fictionalized. It reflects the dangers of following the Cult of Personality.

      The book is well-written and well-crafted. The interwoven storylines inform each other, such that the reader gains a vivid picture of what life was like in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. Be aware that the content includes gruesome descriptions of brutal violence, torture, and sexual abuse.

      4.5
    • 3/5
      Garcia Marquez takes on similar material but achieves greater artistry with Autumn of the Patriarch.
    • 3/5
      The Feast of the Goat takes its title from the nickname for Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the dictator whose 30-year reign of terror in the Dominican Republic ended with his assassination in 1961. Trained by the Marines, and long an anti-Communist client of the American government, Trujillo eventually became an isolated pariah. Like the younger Castro, whom the clean-cut, right-wing general despised, Trujillo encouraged a cult of personality that made him more than a simple head of state. The novel has three parallel narrative threads. In the current day, a woman whose father was a member of the Trujillo government is returning to her native land from the US for the first time in over 30 years. Through her eyes we see the long-term impact of the dictatorship. The other two narratives follow Trujillo, on the one hand, and his would-be assassins on the other. In each case there are flashbacks to fill in the picture of a country, its leaders, and its people after 30 years of brutality and corruption.

      Though we meet him in the last hours of his life, old, embittered, ailing and besieged, he still sees himself as a soldier and regards the Haitians across the border as heathens to be purged and murdered. For more than three decades, Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist. He cured the "Haitian problem" by having between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians slaughtered.

      There are extremely disturbing sexual and torture scenes that described his reign of terror. I had to skim some of those because they were just too much for me. Trujillo was an incredibly evil man but if you are interested in Caribbean politics this is a compelling but horrifying read. I think most people would rate it a bit higher than I did but I will try another of Vargas Llosa's books. It's easy to see why he won the 2010 Nobel prize for literature.
    • 3/5
      The Feast of the Goat is a work of historical fiction that recounts the latter years of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. At times it reads more like non-fiction than fiction, and I often felt like I was reading a history book. Most of the characters are historical figures, including Trujillo and his assassins. The author took a lot of liberties describing their inner lives, and it was interesting to read his depictions of the thoughts and motivations of historical figures. (In the book, Trujillo was struggling quite a bit with his incontinence and impotence. Whether this is based on historical evidence I do not know.) That was really the odd thing about the book, everything was so historical, I didn't know what really happened and what didn't.

      I am glad I read the book, although it was slow reading and dense. If you are interested in Dominican history, I would recommend it. Be warned that there are some very graphic descriptions of torture and abuse at the hands of the Trujillo regime.
    • 4/5
      In a way that Latin American literature seems to excel at, this is at once gripping in its raw depiction of desperation and corruption, and obscene and disturbing. It's as if the author has decided 'you need to hear this' and the reader's sensibilities are not spared - just as the participants in this story of a successful (and failed) coup are not spared the author's castigation, or their torturers electrodes. What makes this no less disturbing is that, although fictionalised, the story is an almost perfect rendering of history, if anything so evil could be called 'perfect'. Set in the 1960's in the Dominican Republic the story is horribly contemporary. Recommended, but with the caveat that this is (great) literature, but not by any means entertainment.
    • 5/5
      Mario Vargas Llosa is a recipient of the Nobel prize for literature in 2010. This novel originally written in Spanish has been translated into English by Edith Grossman.The novel is a historical novel with fictional elements to it. It tells the story of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of The Dominican Republic, from 1930-1961. The novel highlights the final days of this regime starting a few days before Trujillo's assassination to six months later narrating the aftermath of the dictator's assassination.It also tells the story of Urania, a fictional character who is the daughter of one of the dictator's minister.This is a superb novel. The story is good and the writing is fantastic. A 5/5 star read.
    • 5/5
      This fictionalised account of the last days of Trujillo, the feared and fanatical ruler of the Dominican Republic, is interspersed with the story of Urania, a 49-year-old lawyer who escaped the island when she was fourteen. Urania's father was one of Trujillo's inner circle, a sycophant whose life was destroyed when he fell out of favour. Trujillo is surrounded by sycophants, because Trujillo rewards his friends and kills anyone who criticises him.This is a real page turner. I wanted to know Urania's story: why does she hate her father, and why has she never returned to Dominica? Will the conspiracy to assassinate Trujillo succeed? Will the conspirators survive? Will Trujillo's insane brothers and son destroy the country?
    • 4/5
      Rafael Trujillo, known as El Jefe (“The chief”), was dictator of the Dominican Republic for 30 years; his reign of terror ended in his assassination in 1961. This novel explores the ending days of the Trujillo regime using multiple plot lines / narrators. The novel opens with the fictional Urania Cabral, age 49, returning to the Dominican Republic for the first time in 35 years, to see her dying father. Although Trujillo is dead she cannot help but relive the terror of that last year in her father’s house, and wonders whether her return to her native city is a mistake. The second chapter introduces Trujillo himself as a narrator, giving the reader insight into his particularly twisted egotism. The third chapter focuses on the band of conspirators who are plotting to assassinate Trujillo.

      The novel deals with political and personal corruption, moving back and forth between narrators and time frame mostly without transition. Several of the chapters involving Urania’s story bounce back and forth in time from paragraph to paragraph as she begins to actually relive the memories she is relating in present time. In less skilled hands, this could easily have been the undoing of the novel, but Vargas Llosa is a master craftsman and his writing shines. His use of interlaced dialogue helps to present the various viewpoints of the same set of events, giving the reader a fairly accurate portrayal of the history, while making the story intensely personal.

      “Machismo” is also a central theme; Urania is the only female voice, and practically the only female in the cast of characters. Her point of view, relating her memories as a 14-year-old child, is a significant contrast to the mostly middle-aged-plus men who narrate the significant realities of the Trujillo regime. The men are constantly posturing, proving their manhood or being challenged to prove it. Those who cannot are figuratively (and sometimes literally) emasculated.

      The greatest impact in the story comes from betrayal … in many forms. Trujillo betrayed the people of the Dominican Republic. Conspirators were betrayed by fellow conspirators. Husbands betrayed their wives; wives, their husbands. Children betrayed by their parents; parents by their children.

      I thought the novel started slowly and if it were not a book-club selection I might have given up, but after about 80 pages the story really took off and I found myself totally immersed and engaged.
    • 5/5
      The Feast of the Goat is an enormously powerful, brutal and moving historical novel about the prologue and aftermath to Trujillo
    • 2/5
      Mr Llosa can write. I won't dispute that. But this is not a good novel for me for the following reasons. (1) The author has bitten off far more than he can chew in a mere 400 pages. The scope of the book is vast and too much feels rushed. He might have narrowed his scope, but alas he wants it all. Because of the enormous narrative breadth, this reader never got the level of satisfaction in the area of character development that he would have liked; there are so many characters and after a while they all seem to blur. (2) There is a rushed, headlong quality to the book, probably this is intentional but I do not like it. (3) I find the levels of Catholic motivation to be too much; probably for a Latin American reader these levels are just right. For these and other reasons I did not finish the book and give it two stars.

      The book breaks into three stories: (1) that of Urania Cabral, set in the present day, when she returns to a now democratized Dominican Republic years after Trujillo's assassination to confront (torment) her father who was a "senator" (read crony) under the Benefactor; (2) that of Trujillo himself in the weeks before his assassination; and (3) that of the group of men, mostly young men, who will kill him.

      The story Urania tells to her incapacitated father, who is now in a wheelchair, is most unsettling. Urania is visiting from New York City where she now lives. She has done extensive reading on the subject, now knows much about those dark mysterious years of her youth. For example, how Trujillo, habitually cuckolded his ministers. Urania spares her mute father none of it. She is so cruel.

      Dictator Trujillo is a megalomaniac on the model of Stalin. He terrorized his own people for 31 years. In October 1937 he ordered the slaughter of about 20,000 Haitians in what came to be known as the Parsley Massacre. Typically, the US backed him as a bulwark against Communism. (Now where have we seen that pattern before? Chile, Vietnam, Cuba, and Korea spring to mind, to mention a few.)

      Trujillo's a compulsive neat freak who seeks through personal cleanliness and punctilio a semblance of the moral standing he can never command. We first come across him undergoing his daily toilette with great care. Trujillo's story begins in 1961 some 16 months after a Pastoral Letter has been sent by the Vatican to the Catholic community in the Dominican Republic. Since then the Church has, Trujillo feels, harassed him from the pulpit for his flagrant human rights violations and turned the people against him. The two Catholic leaders responsible for this he imagines feeding alive to sharks, as he has so many other opponents.

      The assassins's storyline is set on May 30, 1961, as they await the Generalissimo's car on a stretch of road. There are 4 of them in the car and as they wait there are flashbacks outlining the motivations of each. This is tedious.

      In some ways The Feast of the Goat is a counterpart novel to Graham Greene's The Comedians. That book--set in Haiti on the other side of Hispaniola in the 1960s when the corrupt Duvaliers were in power--is a model of narrative pacing and economy.
    • 4/5
      Intense read about the last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Told from the points of view of several important players as well as the fictional Urania Cabral who returns to the island after 35 years of self-exile.
    • 4/5
      I found this a powerful story even though it was unpleasant (to say the least!) in places. The novel tells of the final days of Trujillo's rule in the Dominican Republic through a series of flashbacks seen through differing eyes while the main character Urania is making her first visit back to the country 35 years later. I can't really say that I liked this novel; it dealt with a history I don't share and one that was filled with horrors. However, Vargas Llosa's writing was brilliant and kept me interested and reading even when I knew that something that would make me cringe was coming. The multiple points of view were fascinating and the switches from past to present helped build tension and release it simultaneously.
    • 4/5
      Mario Vargas Llosa's book "The Feast of the Goat" was a brutal read, but ultimately an interesting one. I probably wouldn't have read this if it hadn't been on the list of 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, but it was certainly a worthwhile book.The novel tells the story of Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years with an iron fist. He pitted his advisers and friends against each other and demanded adoration from the all in his country. The novel is not an easy read-- there are torture scenes that a fairly disturbing, which I mostly skimmed over. However, I found the portrait of the Trujillo and his "friends" to be well done and very relevant to today's world.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I found it difficult to say I 'liked' or 'enjoyed' a book that was so harrowing, though I can appreciate the quality of the writing. It did teach me something about a country and a period of its history I knew nothing about.
    • 4/5
      I didn't exactly enjoy reading this book. I am not into enjoying reading about the suffering of others, the total subjugation of a nation, the corruption of their souls and the torture of their bodies. I learned many things from this book that I wasn't aware of, some history of the Dominican Republic and what is known as the Trujillo era. So while I didn't "enjoy" the book, it was hard to put down, I had to continue, to keep reading and I'm glad that I did. This book is not light reading, but definitely worth your time and attention.
    • 1/5
      a slog through the Dominican Republic at the end of Trujillo's madness. Although I imagine "The Feast of the Goat" is interesting to Dominicans and Caribbean political junkies, I'm neither and gave up slogging about half-way through.
    • 4/5
      4.5 stars

      This book has made me want to learn more from my parents about what it meant to be born and live through the Trujillo era. What it meant to my family and what was really going on during that time. I have heard some stories from my father, but now the context of understanding has broadened... this book has illustrated to me the pain of a nation and it's impact on individual lives.

      It has also made me think of the depraved regimes that exist today and how complicit we are in our inactivity... why so many men of power choose their greedy and sadistic lives, and so many choose to do nothing.

      The Feast of the Goat, highlights the story of the era of Trujillo in a way that makes you see history as real and not just text in a book. Although fictionalized, it brings home, the vast pain of a nation; but also, how blind and apathetic a people can be. It breaks my heart to see that so many innocent people are made to pay for the choices of the few.

      I would like think my choices would be different given the same set of circumstances, but then, I was born a different person, in a different era.
    • 4/5
      In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature describes the brutal reign and fall of Domican dictator Rafael Trujillo (aka the Goat) through three different perspectives. The first is Urania Cabral, a successful American lawyer, who left the Domican Republic when she was 14. She returns 40 years later to see her father, who had been a member of Trujillo's corrupt government. The 2 other points of view are through Trujillo himself, at the end of his reign, and a group of American-backed revolutionaries who have decided to free their country by assassinating the Goat. The story is fast-paced and mesmerizing and I found seeing the history of this country through different people's eyes fascinating. Excellent book.
    • 5/5
      An excellent novel, another brilliant book by Llosa. Three storylines, brilliantly researched depiction of a living hell - a mad dictatorship.
    • 4/5
      I chose to read this book because it's on the 1001 books to read before you die list and there is a group read of it. I knew it would be a little out of my comfort zone, but I ended up really appreciating it, though I can't say I enjoyed a book this brutal. This book is about the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era (roughly 1930s-1960s). It starts in the present day with Urania Cabral who is in her late 40s finally returning to the country that she fled from just before Trujillo's assassination. She left as a 14 year old girl after a traumatic experience that led her to break ties with her father, a high-up political figure. Her story is slowly revealed and sheds light on Trujillo's personality and her father's fall from favor. Another story line is that of Trujillo himself in the days before his assassination. Vargas Llosa paints a fascinating portrait of the dictator, his hunger for power, and the inner insecurities of his mind. Along with these two stories is the story of the men behind the assassination. As they wait to ambush Trujillo, flashbacks tell how they got there. In the end, it all comes together and you witness the brutal aftermath of the assassination and find out what happens to this small country when their dictator is gone. Mario Vargas Llosa writes with a ton of confidence. His writing is smooth and authoritative. I believed every word of his portrait of this man, which bothered me at times since this is fiction, after all. Even though this isn't my favorite sort of book, I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the era and topic.
    • 4/5
      As Bob Dylan once sang, “Democracy don’t rule the world.” This is the story of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, with the fictional element of the Cabral family added in, a family which was torn apart by the events of 1961 prior to Trujillo’s assassination. Urania Cabral, who was 14 at the time and left the country after being traumatized, has returned 35 years later for the first time to see her family and to confront her demons. Trujillo was one of most ‘successful’ of the many dictators in Latin America, ruling with an iron hand, fending off threats from the communists, America, the Catholic Church, and Haiti, and all while growing rich and having anything he wanted, including the wives of the sycophants around him, and young virgins, even late in life, at the age of 70. It’s an obvious example of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Trujillo has his enemies tortured and killed, massacres tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants, and insists upon being worshipped by his people. The sexual abuses are an activity picked up by his degenerate sons, reminiscent of Saddam Hussein and his sons. The novel made me thank my lucky stars I was born into a far better situation, and it’s an interesting perspective, as the United States and JFK are viewed in passing, a threat to this little world, and yet distant. The novel may also cause you to ask yourself difficult questions. To what lengths would you go to embrace a man in power, if he was bringing order and some degree of prosperity to your country? Would you try to stand up to him, knowing that you would be risking not only yourself but your family – your parents, your spouse, your children, all of them – to imprisonment, torture, and horrifying deaths? What moral compromises would you make to survive, and how far would you take those, if they meant subjecting an innocent loved one to horrors? If you were part of a plot that required perfect execution, would you hesitate at the critical moment, or would you be brave and resolute throughout? Would you harbor a stranger who was a fugitive, if you knew that should he be discovered in your house, it would be looted, burned to the ground, and the only way you could consider yourself lucky is if your death came quickly?As in any situation, there is a mix of reactions from the characters involved, some admirable, some abominable. The human condition. Vargas Llosa weaves the story together masterfully, alternating between perspectives and between past and present. Despite all of its revolting events, the novel is one of endurance, both for Urania, and for the country, which heals under an intelligent but unlikely leader in Joaquin Balaguer, who navigates through the chaos which ensued after the assassination with a deft hand. For that’s what we must do: be brave, fight the good fight, and endure.Quotes:On books, loved this one, quoting Rabindranath Tagore:“An open book is a mind that speaks; closed, a friend who waits; forgotten, a soul that forgives; destroyed, a heart that weeps.”On killing:“’How did Your Excellency feel when you gave the order to eliminate thousands of illegal Haitians?’‘Ask your former President Truman how he felt when he gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then you’ll know what I felt that night in Dajabon.’”On “prayer”, so blatantly sacrilegious, and loved the ending to this:“’Dear God, do this for me. Tonight I need to fuck Yolanda Esterel right. So I can know I’m not dead. Not an old man. And can go on doing your work for you, moving this damn country of assholes forward. I don’t care about the priests, the gringos, the conspirators, the exiles. I can clear away all that shit myself. But I need your help to fuck that girl. Don’t be a miser, don’t be stingy. Give me your help, give it to me.’ He sighed, with the disagreeable suspicion that the one he was pleading with, if he existed, must be observing him in amusement from the dark blue backdrop where the first stars had begun to appear.”On the outer shell:“Urania! What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?”And this one, on being damaged:“Are you an iceberg, Urania? Only with men. And not with all of them. With those whose glances, movements, gestures, tones of voice announce a danger. When you can read, in their minds or instincts, the intention to court you, to make advances. With them, yes, you do make them feel the arctic cold that you know how to project around you, like the stink skunks use to frighten away an enemy. A technique you handle with the mastery you’ve brought to every goal you set for yourself: studies, work, an independent life. ‘Everything except being happy.’ Would she have been happy if, applying her will, her discipline, she had eventually overcome the unconquerable revulsion and disgust caused by men who desired her? You could have gone into therapy, seen a psychologist, an analyst. They had a remedy for everything, even finding men repugnant. But you never wanted to be cured. On the contrary, you don’t consider it a disease but a character trait, like your intelligence, your solitude, your passion for doing good work.”
    • 4/5
      This is the story of Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and the conspiracy to murder him and change the government. A parallel and personal story is that of Urania, the daughter of a disgraced Trujillo government official. What a compelling story and so well told. Though Vargas Llosa jumps around in time with abandon and with no apparent breaks in the text, he manages to keep me unconfused. The story of Urania serves to personalize the destructive and long-term this evil regime had upon the Dominican Republic. I did feel that I came to know Trujillo and his cronies better than I knew the opposition players; though each had his own story, I wasn't always clear on their individuality. What an exciting way to learn the story of this country!
    • 5/5
      Brutal. Absolutely brutal. That is really the only way to describe the events portrayed in ‘The Feast of the Goat’, a work of historical fiction that records the turbulent end of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In graphic and meticulous detail, Vargas Llosa does an absolutely masterful job of weaving the history of the 31-year reign of terror and social progress that marked Rafael Trujillo’s stranglehold on the country alongside the riveting tension associated with his last several hours on earth. This is grim and gritty writing that never shies away from chronicling every bit of the murder, torture, dismemberment, sexual violation, and humiliation that were “The Goat’s” primary means of subjugating the population.In what turns out to be an effective literary device, the story is told from three perspectives and two different time frames in alternating chapters. Urania Cabral, a successful lawyer visiting her homeland for the first time after living in the United States for 35 years, has returned to confront her father and the ghosts of the past that she buried when she left the island just weeks before Trujillo’s assassination. The other two narratives take place in 1961 and focus on the Generalissimo as he progresses through the day on which he is killed as well as several of the “executioners” involved in the murder plot. While the tale of Urania and her father, Senator Augustin Cabral, is pure fiction (i.e., they did not really exist), those centered on Trujillo, his sadistic comrades, and his assassins are embellished accounts based on factual occurrences. In fact, the historical portions of the novel work far better than the parts set in the modern day; in tone and substance, Urania’s story seemed a little disjoint from the other accounts and was almost a distraction. Regardless, ‘The Feast of the Goat’ is a powerful meditation on how absolute power truly does corrupt absolutely, irrespective of whether the original intentions were noble and just (and sanctioned by both the Church and the U.S. government). With few heroes and very little hope, this is a book that was, at times, very difficult to read. Nevertheless, it is also an important work that deserves all of the acclaim it has received.
    • 5/5
      “The Chief cut the Gordian knot: “Enough!” Great ills demand great remedies! He not only justified the massacre of Haitians in 1937; he considered it a great accomplishment of the regime. Didn’t he save the Republic from being prostituted a second time by that marauding neighbour? What do five, ten, twenty thousand Haitians matter when it’s a question of saving an entire people?”Beautifully written the story immerses you in the last days of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1969, when the Catholic Church and USA have turned their back on him and assassination plots grow thick. This is not a story to be read in snatches, take a deep breath and dive in as characters and time lines are expertly, thickly, layered to create one of the best, most exciting historical fictions books I have read in a long while. The Dominican setting comes fully alive in Llosa's hands as do the multitude of characters. For he loves to get into the characters heads, to show you what they are thinking and where they have come from. This deepness creates a gripping and horrifying tale of the impact of dictatorship, of a endemic misogynistic culture, of the cruelty of international politics, that some things can never be forgiven.The cast we follow is deftly chosen; Trujillo himself on his last day, the assassins waiting on a lonely road, an odious cabinet minster or two. He balances these characters, adding extra dimension to the tale by also following X who is returning to the Dominican Republic many years after these events, returning after the traumatic events forced her to flee. If it seems overwhelming it isn’t they all flow into just 3 story arch’s of Trujillo, of the murder and of the present. But Llosa doesn't baby the audience, you need to be awake for this, to do it justice. Llosa has this great literary trick used towards the end when a reminisces will segue present into past without breaking sweat, hammering home the impact to sublime effect.I like it so much it’s hard to see where others may dislike it, the darkness could be a problem, the seeming complexity or the simplification of history (note I don’t know how accurate it is) or maybe they feel some characters to be superfluous. Still it’s worth a go and I highly recommend it, you don’t need to know the history (although nicknames can be confusing), this is a book to experience, to chew on and even to love.
    • 5/5
      The Feast of the Goat is micro-history, in fictional form, of the last days of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, his assassination, and its immediate aftermath. In the more general sense, it is about how tyranny degrades the human spirit.Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Because of his anti-communist politics, the United States and the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the brutality of Trujillo's regime until 1960, when his crimes became to blatant to be ignored. Economic sanctions and denunciations quickly brought matters in the Dominican Republic to a crisis.The novel has three parallel narrative threads. In the current day, a woman whose father was a member of the Trujillo government is returning to her native land from the US for the first time in over 30 years. Through her eyes we see the long-term impact of the dictatorship. The other two narratives follow Trujillo, on the one hand, and his would-be assassins on the other. In case there are flashbacks to fill in the picture of a country, its leaders, and its people after 30 years of brutality and corruption.Compared to the other novels I have read by this author, the style of The Feast of the Goat is more conventional. The plot is driven by historical events, with less attention to character development than in a typical novel. The book is a tense and gritty depiction of the abuse of power, one that is both disturbing and utterly convincing.

    Book preview

    The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa

    1

    Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo—when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You’ll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzmán by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father’s idea too?

    She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the remote line of the horizon, while here, at the shore, it breaks in resounding, whitecapped waves against the Sea Walk, the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through the palms and almond trees that line it. Back then, the Hotel Jaragua faced the Malecón directly. Now it’s to the side. Her memory brings back the image—was that the day?—of the little girl holding her father’s hand as they entered the hotel restaurant so the two of them could have lunch together. They were given a table next to the window, and through the sheer lace curtains Uranita could see the spacious garden and the pool with its diving boards and swimmers. In the Patio Español, surrounded by glazed tiles and flowerpots filled with carnations, an orchestra was playing merengues. Was that the day? No, she says aloud. The Jaragua of those days had been torn down and replaced by this massive shocking-pink structure that had surprised her so much when she arrived in Santo Domingo three days ago.

    Were you right to come back? You’ll be sorry, Urania. Wasting a week’s vacation, when you never had time to visit all the cities, regions, countries you would have liked to see—the mountain ranges and snow-covered lakes of Alaska, for instance—returning to the island you swore you’d never set foot on again. A symptom of decline? The sentimentality of age? Curiosity, nothing more. To prove to yourself you can walk along the streets of this city that is no longer yours, travel through this foreign country and not have it provoke sadness, nostalgia, hatred, bitterness, rage in you. Or have you come to confront the ruin of your father? To learn what effect seeing him has on you, after so many years. A shudder runs the length of her body. Urania, Urania! What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?

    She bursts into laughter. Enough foolishness, my girl.

    She puts on sneakers, slacks, a tailored blouse, and pulls back her hair. She drinks a glass of cold water and is about to turn on the television to watch CNN but changes her mind. She remains at the window, looking at the ocean, the Malecón, and then, turning her head, at the city’s forest of roofs, towers, domes, belfries, and treetops. It’s grown so much! When you left, in 1961, it sheltered three hundred thousand souls. More than a million now. It has filled up with neighborhoods, avenues, parks, hotels. The night before, she felt like a foreigner as she drove a rented car past the condominiums in Bella Vista, and the immense El Mirador Park, where there were as many joggers as in Central Park. When she was a girl, the city ended at the Hotel El Embajador; beyond that point, it was all farms and fields. The Country Club, where her father took her on Sundays to swim in the pool, was surrounded by open countryside, not the asphalt, houses, and streetlights that are there now.

    But the colonial city has not been modernized, and neither has Gazcue, her neighborhood. And she is absolutely certain her house has hardly changed at all. It must be the same, with its small garden, old mango tree, and the flamboyán with red flowers bending over the terrace where they used to have lunch outdoors on weekends; the sloping roof and the little balcony outside her bedroom, where she would go to wait for her cousins Lucinda and Manolita, and, during that last year, 1961, spy on the boy who rode past on his bicycle, watching her out of the corner of his eye and not daring to speak. Would it be the same inside? The Austrian clock that sounded the hours had Gothic numerals and a hunting scene. Would her father be the same? No. You’ve seen him failing in the photos sent to you every few months or years by Aunt Adelina and other relatives who continued to write even though you never answered their letters.

    She drops into an armchair. The rising sun penetrates to the center of the city; the dome of the National Palace and its pale ocher walls sparkle gently under a curve of blue. Go now, soon the heat will be unbearable. She closes her eyes, overcome by a rare inertia, for she is accustomed to always being active and not wasting time in what, since her return to Dominican soil, has occupied her day and night: remembering. This daughter of mine is always working, she even repeats her lessons when she’s asleep. That’s what Senator Agustín Cabral, Minister Cabral, Egghead Cabral used to say about you when he boasted to his friends about the girl who won all the prizes, the student the sisters always held up as an example. Did he boast to the Chief about Uranita’s scholarly achievements? I’d like so much for you to know her, she has won the Prize for Excellence every year since she enrolled at Santo Domingo. It would make her so happy to meet you and shake your hand. Uranita prays every night for God to protect that iron health of yours. And for Doña Julia and Doña María as well. Do us this honor. The most loyal of your dogs asks, begs, implores you. You can’t refuse: receive her. Excellency! Chief!

    Do you despise him? Do you hate him? Still? Not anymore, she says aloud. You wouldn’t have come back if the rancor were still sizzling, the wound still bleeding, the deception still crushing her, poisoning her, the way it did in your youth, when studying and working became an obsessive defense against remembering. Back then you did hate him. With every atom of your being, with all the thought and feeling your body could hold. You wanted him to suffer misfortunes, diseases, accidents. God granted your wish, Urania. Or rather, the devil did. Isn’t it enough that the cerebral hemorrhage brought him a living death? A sweet revenge that he has spent the last ten years in a wheelchair, not walking or talking, depending on a nurse to eat, lie down, dress, undress, trim his nails, shave, urinate, defecate? Do you feel avenged? No.

    She drinks a second glass of water and goes out. It’s seven in the morning. On the ground floor of the Jaragua she is assaulted by the noise, that atmosphere, familiar by now, of voices, motors, radios blaring at full volume, merengues, salsas, danzones, boleros, rock, rap, all jumbled together, assailing one another and assailing her with their shrill clamor. Animated chaos, the profound need in what was once your people, Urania, to stupefy themselves into not thinking and, perhaps, not even feeling. An explosion of savage life, immune to the tide of modernization. Something in Dominicans clings to this pre-rational, magical form: this appetite for noise. (For noise, not music.)

    She doesn’t remember a commotion like this in the street when she was a girl and Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo. Perhaps it didn’t exist back then: perhaps, thirty-five years ago, when the city was three or four times smaller, provincial, isolated, made wary by fear and servility, its soul shrinking in terrified reverence for the Chief, the Generalissimo, the Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, His Excellency Dr. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, it was quieter and less frenetic. Today, all the clamor of life—car engines, cassettes, records, radios, horns, barks, growls, human voices—seems to resound at top volume, producing vocal, mechanical, digital, or animal noise at maximum capacity (dogs bark louder, birds chirp with more enthusiasm). And New York is famous for being noisy! Never, in the ten years she has spent in Manhattan, have her ears been subjected to anything like the brutal, cacophonous symphony in which she has been immersed for the past three days.

    The sun burns the silvery tops of towering palms, the broken sidewalk with so many holes it looks bombed, the mountains of trash that some women with scarves tied around their heads sweep up and collect in inadequate bags. Haitians. They’re silent now, but yesterday they were whispering among themselves in Creole. A little farther on, she sees two barefoot, half-naked Haitian men sitting on boxes under dozens of vividly colored paintings displayed on the wall of a building. It’s true, the city, perhaps the country, has filled with Haitians. Back then, it didn’t happen. Isn’t that what Senator Agustín Cabral said? You can say what you like about the Chief. History, at least, will recognize that he has created a modern country and put the Haitians in their place. Great ills demand great remedies! The Chief found a small country barbarized by wars among the caudillos, a country without law and order, impoverished, losing its identity, invaded by its starving, ferocious neighbors. They waded across the Masacre River and came to steal goods, animals, houses, they took the jobs of our agricultural workers, perverted our Catholic religion with their diabolical witchcraft, violated our women, ruined our Western, Hispanic culture, language, and customs, imposed their African savagery on us. The Chief cut the Gordian knot: Enough! Great ills demand great remedies! He not only justified the massacre of Haitians in 1937; he considered it a great accomplishment of the regime. Didn’t he save the Republic from being prostituted a second time by that marauding neighbor? What do five, ten, twenty thousand Haitians matter when it’s a question of saving an entire people?

    She walks quickly, recognizing landmarks: the Casino de Güibia, converted into a nightclub, and the bathing beach that reeks now of sewage; soon she’ll reach the corner of the Malecón and Avenida Máximo Gómez, the itinerary followed by the Chief on his evening walks. After the doctors told him it was good for his heart, he would walk from Radhamés Manor to Máximo Gómez, with a stop at the house of Doña Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, where Uranita once gave a speech and almost couldn’t get the words out, and come down the George Washington Malecón, turn this corner, and continue on to the obelisk that imitated the one in Washington, moving at a brisk pace, surrounded by ministers, advisers, generals, aides, courtiers, all at a respectful distance, their eyes alert, their hearts expectant, waiting for a gesture, an expression that would allow them to approach the Chief, listen to him, be worthy of his conversation even if it was a reprimand. Anything except being kept at a distance, in the hell of the forgotten. How many times did you walk with them, Papa? How many times were you worthy of having him talk to you? And how many times did you come home saddened because he did not call to you, fearful you were no longer in the circle of the elect, that you had fallen among the censured? You always lived in terror that the story of Anselmo Paulino would be repeated in you. And it was repeated, Papa.

    Urania laughs and a couple in Bermuda shorts walking past in the opposite direction think she is smiling at them: Good morning. She isn’t smiling at them but at the image of Senator Agustín Cabral trotting along this Malecón every evening, among the deluxe servants, attentive not to the warm breeze, the sound of the sea, the acrobatics of the gulls, the brilliant stars of the Caribbean, but to the Chief’s hands, eyes, gestures that perhaps would call to him, prefer him over all the rest. She has reached the Agrarian Bank. Then comes Ramfis Manor, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still located, and the Hotel Hispaniola. Then a half-turn.

    Calle César Nicolás Penson, corner of Galván, she thinks. Would she go or would she return to New York without even looking at her house? You’ll go in and ask the nurse for the invalid and go up to the bedroom and the terrace where they take him for his siesta, the terrace that turned red with the blossoms from the flamboyán. Hello, Papa. How are you, Papa? Don’t you recognize me? It’s Urania. Of course, how could you recognize me? The last time you saw me I was fourteen and now I’m forty-nine. A lot of years, Papa. Wasn’t that your age the day I left for Adrian? That’s right, you were forty-eight or forty-nine. A man in his prime. Now you’re almost eighty-four. You’re an old man, Papa. If he’s in any condition to think, he’s had a lot of time over the years to draw up a balance sheet of his long life. You must have thought about your ungrateful daughter, who in thirty-five years never answered a letter, never sent a photo or a birthday card or a Christmas card or a New Year’s greeting, not even when you had the hemorrhage and aunts, uncles, and cousins thought you would die, not even then did she come or ask about your health. What a wicked daughter, Papa.

    The little house on César Nicolás Penson, corner of Galván, probably no longer receives visitors in the entrance foyer, where it was the custom to place an image of the Virgin of Altagracia and the bronze plaque that boasted: In this house Trujillo is the Chief. Have you kept it as proof of your loyalty? No, you must have thrown it in the ocean, like the thousands of Dominicans who bought one and hung it in the most conspicuous place in the house so that no one would doubt their fidelity to the Chief, and, when the spell was broken, tried to wipe away the traces, ashamed of what it represented: their cowardice. I’ll bet you made yours disappear too, Papa.

    She has reached the Hispaniola. She is sweating, her heart racing. A double river of cars, vans, and trucks moves along Avenida George Washington, and it seems to her that they all have their radios on and the noise will shatter her eardrums. Occasionally a man’s head will look out of some vehicle and for an instant her eyes meet a pair of male eyes that look at her breasts, her legs, her behind. Those looks. She is waiting for a break in traffic that will let her cross, and again she tells herself, as she did yesterday and the day before yesterday, that she is on Dominican soil. In New York nobody looks at a woman with that arrogance anymore. Measuring her, weighing her, calculating how much flesh there is in each one of her breasts and thighs, how much hair on her pubis, the exact curve of her buttocks. She closes her eyes, feeling slightly dizzy. In New York not even Latins—Dominicans, Colombians, Guatemalans—give such looks. They’ve learned to repress them, realized they mustn’t look at women the way male dogs look at female dogs, stallions look at mares, boars look at sows.

    In a pause between cars she races across the road. Instead of making a half-turn and returning to the Jaragua, her steps, not her will, lead her around the Hispaniola and back along Independencia, an avenue that, if memory serves, starts here, with a double line of leafy laurels whose tops meet over the road, cooling it, until it divides in two and disappears in the middle of the colonial city. How many times did you stroll, holding your father’s hand, in the murmuring shade of the laurels along Independencia? The two of you would come down to the avenue from César Nicolás Penson and walk to Independencia Park. In the Italian ice-cream parlor, on the right, at the beginning of El Conde, you would eat coconut, mango, or guava ice cream. How proud you felt holding that gentleman’s hand—Senator Agustín Cabral, Minister Cabral. Everybody knew who he was. They would approach him, hold out their hands, doff their hats, bow, and police and soldiers would click their heels when they saw him pass by. How you must have missed those years of importance, Papa, when you became just another poor devil in the crowd. They were satisfied with insulting you in The Public Forum, but they didn’t put you in jail, like Anselmo Paulino. It was what you feared most, wasn’t it? That one day the Chief would give the order: Egghead goes to jail! You were lucky, Papa.

    After three-quarters of an hour she still has a long way to go to reach the hotel. If she had taken money, she would go into a cafeteria to have breakfast and rest. She constantly has to wipe perspiration from her face. The years, Urania. At forty-nine one is no longer young. No matter what shape you’re in compared with other women. But you’re not ready yet to be tossed out with the trash, judging by the looks that come from right and left and rest on her face and body, the insinuating, greedy, brazen, insolent looks of males accustomed to undressing all the females on the street with their eyes and thoughts. Forty-nine years that really become you, Uri, said Dick Litney, her colleague and friend from the office, in New York, on her birthday, a bold statement that no man in the firm would have allowed himself to make unless he, like Dick that night, had two or three whiskeys under his belt. Poor Dick. He blushed and became confused when Urania froze him with one of those slow looks she had used for thirty-five years to confront the gallantries, sudden off-color jokes, witticisms, allusions, or unwelcome moves from men, and sometimes women.

    She stops to catch her breath. She feels her heart beating wildly, her chest rising and falling. She is at the corner of Independencia and Máximo Gómez, in a crowd of men and women waiting to cross. Her nose registers a range of odors as great as the endless variety of noises hammering at her ears: the oil burned by the motors of the buses and escaping through their exhausts, tongues of smoke that dissipate or remain floating over the pedestrians; smells of grease and frying from a stand where two pans sputter and food and drinks are for sale; and that dense, indefinable, tropical aroma of decomposing resins and underbrush, of perspiring bodies, an air saturated with animal, vegetable, and human essences protected by a sun that delays their dissolution and passing. A hot odor that touches some intimate fiber of memory and returns her to childhood, to multicolored heartsease hanging from roofs and balconies, to this same Avenida Máximo Gómez. Mother’s Day! Of course. May with its brilliant sun, its torrential downpours, its heat. The girls from Santo Domingo Academy selected to bring flowers to Mama Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, progenitor of the Benefactor and the example and symbol of Dominican motherhood. They came from school in a bus, wearing their immaculate white uniforms and accompanied by Mother Superior and Sister Mary. You burned with curiosity, pride, affection, respect. You were going to represent the school in the house of Mama Julia. You were going to recite for her the poem Mother and Teacher, Sublime Matriarch, which you had written, memorized, and recited dozens of times in front of the mirror, in front of your classmates, in front of Lucinda and Manolita, in front of Papa, in front of the sisters, and which you had silently repeated to yourself to be sure you would not forget a single syllable. When the glorious moment arrived in Mama Julia’s large pink house, you were disconcerted by the military men, ladies, aides, delegations crowded into gardens, rooms, corridors, overwhelmed by emotion and tenderness, and when you stepped forward to within a meter of the old lady smiling benevolently from her rocking chair and holding the bouquet of roses Mother Superior had just presented to her, your throat constricted and your mind went blank. You burst into tears. You heard laughter, encouraging words from the ladies and gentlemen who surrounded Mama Julia. The Sublime Matriarch smiled and beckoned to you. Then Uranita composed herself, dried her tears, stood up straight, and firmly, rapidly, but without the proper intonation, recited Mother and Teacher, Sublime Matriarch, in an unbroken rush. They applauded. Mama Julia stroked Uranita’s hair, and her mouth, puckered into a thousand wrinkles, kissed her.

    At last the light changes. Urania continues on her way, protected from the sun by the shade of the trees along Máximo Gómez. She has been walking for an hour. It is pleasant to move under the laurels, to see the shrubs with the little red flowers and golden pistils, either cayenne or Christ’s blood, to be lost in her own thoughts, lulled by the anarchy of voices and music, yet alert to the uneven places, potholes, depressions, irregularities in the sidewalk, where she is constantly on the verge of stumbling or stepping on garbage that stray dogs root through. Were you happy back then? You were, when you went with a group of students from Santo Domingo Academy to bring flowers to the Sublime Matriarch on Mother’s Day and recite the poem for her. Though when the protective, beautiful figure of her own childhood vanished from the small house on César Nicolás Penson, perhaps the very notion of happiness also disappeared from Urania’s life. But your father and aunts and uncles—especially Aunt Adelina and Uncle Aníbal, and your cousins Lucindita and Manolita—and old friends did everything possible to fill your mother’s absence with pampering and special treats so you wouldn’t feel lonely or deprived. Your father was both father and mother during those years. That’s why you loved him so much. That’s why it hurt you so much, Urania.

    When she reaches the rear entrance of the Jaragua, a wide, barred gate for cars, stewards, cooks, chambermaids, porters, she doesn’t stop. Where are you going? She hasn’t made any decision. Her mind, concentrating on her girlhood, her school, the Sundays when she would go with her Aunt Adelina and her cousins to the children’s matinee at the Cine Elite, hasn’t even considered the possibility of not going into the hotel to shower and have breakfast. Her feet have decided to continue. She walks unhesitatingly, certain of the route, among pedestrians and cars impatient for the light to change. Are you sure you want to go where you’re going, Urania? Now you know that you’ll go, even though you may regret it.

    She turns left onto Cervantes and walks toward Bolívar, recognizing as if in a dream the one- and two-story chalets with fences and gardens, open terraces and garages, which awaken in her a familiar feeling, these deteriorating images that have been preserved, somewhat faded, chipped along the edges, made ugly with additions and patchwork, small rooms built on flat roofs or assembled at the sides, in the middle of the gardens, to house offspring who marry and cannot live on their own and come home to add to the families, demanding more space. She passes laundries, pharmacies, florist shops, cafeterias, plaques for dentists, doctors, accountants, and lawyers. On Avenida Bolívar she walks as if she were trying to overtake someone, as if she were about to break into a run. Her heart is in her mouth. You’ll collapse at any moment. When she reaches Rosa Duarte she veers left and begins to run. But the effort is too much and she walks again, more slowly now, very close to the off-white wall of a house in case she becomes dizzy again and has to lean on something until she catches her breath. Except for a ridiculously narrow four-story building where the house with the spiked fence used to be, the house that belonged to Dr. Estanislas, who took out her tonsils, nothing has changed; she would even swear that the maids sweeping the gardens and the fronts of the houses are going to greet her: Hello, Uranita. How are you, honey? Girl, how you’ve grown. Mother of God, where are you off to in such a hurry?

    The house hasn’t changed too much either, though she recalled the gray of its walls as intense and now it’s dull, stained, peeling. The garden is a thicket of weeds, dead leaves, withered grass. Nobody has watered or pruned it in years. There’s the mango. Was that the flamboyán? It must have been, when it had leaves and flowers; now, it’s a trunk with bare, rachitic branches.

    She leans against the wrought-iron gate that opens to the garden. The flagstone path has weeds growing through the cracks and is stained by mildew, and at the entrance to the terrace there is a defeated chair with a broken leg. The yellow cretonne-covered furniture is gone. And the little polished glass lamp in the corner that lit the terrace and attracted butterflies during the day and buzzing insects at night. The little balcony off her bedroom no longer is covered by mauve heartsease: it is a cement projection stained with rust.

    At the back of the terrace, a door opens with a long groan. A woman in a white uniform stares at her curiously.

    Are you looking for someone?

    Urania cannot speak; she is too agitated, too shaken, too frightened. She remains mute, looking at the stranger.

    Can I help you? the woman asks.

    I’m Urania, she says at last. Agustín Cabral’s daughter.

    2

    He woke, paralyzed by a sense of catastrophe. He blinked in the dark, immobilized, imprisoned in a web, about to be devoured by a hairy insect covered with eyes. At last he managed to stretch his hand toward the bedside table where he kept the revolver and the loaded submachine gun. But instead of a weapon he grasped the alarm clock: ten to four. He exhaled. Now, at last, he was fully awake. Nightmares again? He still had a few minutes: he was obsessive about punctuality and did not get out of bed before four o’clock. Not a minute before, not a minute after.

    I owe everything I am to discipline, he thought. And discipline, the polestar of his life, he owed to the Marines. He closed his eyes. The entrance tests at San Pedro de Macorís for the Dominican National Police, a force the Yankees decided to create in the third year of the occupation, were very hard. He passed with no difficulty. During training, half of the candidates were eliminated. He relished every exercise demanding agility, boldness, audacity, or stamina, even the brutal ones that tested your will, your obedience to a superior, plunging into mud-holes with a full field pack or surviving in the wild, drinking your own urine and chewing on stalks, weeds, grasshoppers. Sergeant Gittleman gave him the highest rating: You’ll go far, Trujillo. And he had, thanks to the merciless discipline of heroes and mystics taught to him by the Marines. He thought with gratitude of Sergeant Simon Gittleman. A loyal, disinterested gringo in a country of hagglers, bloodsuckers, and assholes. Had the United States had a more sincere friend than Trujillo in the past thirty-one years? What government had given them greater support in the UN? Which was the first to declare war on Germany and Japan? Who gave the biggest bribes to representatives, senators, governors, mayors, lawyers, and reporters in the United States? His reward: economic sanctions by the OAS to make that nigger Rómulo Betancourt happy, to keep sucking at the tit of Venezuelan oil. If Johnny Abbes had handled things better and the bomb had blown off the head of that faggot Rómulo, there wouldn’t be any sanctions and the asshole gringos wouldn’t be handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. But then he wouldn’t have discovered that in a country of two hundred million assholes, he had a friend like Simon Gittleman. Capable of initiating a personal campaign in defense of the Dominican Republic from Phoenix, Arizona, where he had been in business since his retirement from the Marines. And not asking for a cent! There still were men like that in the Marines. Not asking, not charging for anything! What a lesson for those leeches in the Senate and the House of Representatives he’d been feeding for years; they always wanted more checks, more concessions, more decrees, more tax exemptions, and now, when he needed them, they pretended they didn’t know him.

    He looked at the clock: four minutes to go. A magnificent gringo, that Simon Gittleman! A real Marine. Indignant at the offensive against Trujillo by the White House, Venezuela, and the OAS, he gave up his business in Arizona and bombarded the American press with letters, reminding everyone that during all of the Trujillo Era the Dominican Republic had been a bulwark of anti-Communism, the best ally of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Not satisfied with that, he funded—out of his own damn pocket!—support committees, paid for publications, organized conferences. And to set an example, he came to Ciudad Trujillo with his family and rented a house on the Malecón. This afternoon Simon and Dorothy would have lunch with him in the Palace, and the ex-Marine would receive the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, the highest decoration the Dominican Republic could bestow. A real Marine, yes sir!

    Four sharp, now it was time. He turned on the lamp on the night table, put on his slippers, and got up, without the old agility. His bones ached and he felt pains in his leg and back muscles, the way he had a few days ago at Mahogany House, on that damn night with that anemic little bitch. He ground his teeth in annoyance. He was walking to the chair where Sinforoso had laid out his sweat suit and gym shoes when a suspicion stopped him cold. Anxiously he inspected the sheets: the ugly grayish stain befouled the whiteness of the linen. It had leaked out, again. Indignation erased the unpleasant memory of Mahogany House. Damn it! Damn it! This wasn’t an enemy he could defeat like the hundreds, the thousands he had confronted and conquered over the years, buying them, intimidating them, killing them. This lived inside him, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. It was destroying him at precisely the time he needed to be stronger and healthier than ever. That skinny little cunt had brought him bad luck.

    He found his jockstrap, shorts, and undershirt, immaculately washed and ironed, along with his exercise shoes. He dressed with great effort. He never had needed much sleep: when he was a young man in San Cristóbal, when he was the head of the rural guards on the Boca Chica sugar plantation, four or five hours had been enough, even if he had been drinking and fucking till dawn. His ability to recover physically with a minimum of sleep contributed to his aura of superiority. Not anymore. He woke exhausted and couldn’t sleep for even four hours; two or three at the most, and those plagued by nightmares.

    The night before, he lay sleepless, in the dark. Through the window he could see the tops of trees and a piece of sky studded with stars. From time to time, in the clear night, he heard the chatter of those old biddies, night owls declaiming poems by Juan de Dios Peza, Amado Nervo, Rubén Darío (which made him suspect that among them was the Walking Turd, who knew Darío by heart), Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Poems of Love, and the risqué stanzas of Juan Antonio Alix. And, of course, the verses of Doña María, the Dominican writer and moralist. He laughed aloud as he climbed on the stationary bike and began to pedal. His wife had ended up taking herself seriously, and periodically would organize literary evenings in the skating rink at Radhamés Manor and bring in actresses to recite dumb-ass poems. Senator Henry Chirinos, who passed himself off as a poet, would participate in these soirees, feeding his cirrhosis at public expense. To ingratiate themselves with María Martínez, those bitches, just like Chirinos himself, had memorized entire pages of her Moral Meditations or speeches from her theater piece, False Amity. They recited them, and then the biddies applauded. And his wife—for that fat, stupid old woman, the Bountiful First Lady, was his wife—had taken the business about being a writer and moralist seriously. And why not? Didn’t the newspapers, the radio, the television say so? Wasn’t Moral Meditations, with a prologue by the Mexican José Vasconcelos, required reading in the schools, and wasn’t it reprinted every two months? Hadn’t False Amity been the greatest stage hit in the thirty-one years of the Trujillo Era? Hadn’t the critics and reporters, the university professors, priests, and intellectuals, praised her to the skies? Didn’t they devote a seminar to her at the Trujillonian Institute? Hadn’t her concepts been acclaimed by the bishops, those traitorous crows, those Judases, who after living out of his wallet were talking now, just like the Yankees, about human rights? The Bountiful First Lady was a writer and a moralist. No thanks to her, but to him, like everything else that had happened in this country for the past three decades. Trujillo could turn water into wine and multiply loaves of bread if he fucking well felt like it. He reminded María of this during their last argument: "You forget you didn’t write that shit, you can’t even write your name without making grammatical mistakes, it was that Galician traitor José Almoina, paid by me. Don’t you know what people say? That the first letters of False Amity, F and A, stand for Find Almoina. He laughed again, open, joyful laughter. His bitterness had vanished. María burst into tears—How you humiliate me!"—and threatened to complain to Mama Julia. As if his poor ninety-six-year-old mother was in any shape for family arguments. Like his own brothers and sisters, his wife was always running to the Sublime Matriarch to cry on her shoulder. To make peace, he’d had to cross her palm again. What Dominicans whispered was true: the writer and moralist was a grasping, avaricious soul. And had been from the time they were lovers. When she was still a girl she’d thought of setting up a special laundry for the uniforms of the Dominican National Police, and made her first money.

    Pedaling warmed his body. He felt in shape. Fifteen minutes: enough. Another fifteen of rowing before he began the day’s battle.

    The rowing machine was in a small adjoining room filled with exercise equipment. He had begun rowing, and then a horse’s whinny vibrated in the silence of dawn, long and musical, like a joyful paean to life. How long since he’d ridden? Months. He had never tired of it, after fifty years it still excited him, like his first sip of Carlos I Spanish brandy or his first sight of the naked, white, voluptuous body of a woman he desired. But this thought was poisoned by the memory of the skinny little thing that son of a bitch had managed to get into his bed. Did he do it knowing he would be shamed? No, he didn’t have the balls for that. She probably told him about it and gave him a good laugh. It must be making the rounds now of all the gossipmongers in the coffee shops along El Conde. He trembled with mortification and rage as he rowed in a steady rhythm. He was sweating now. If they could see him! Another myth they repeated about him was: Trujillo never sweats. In the worst heat of summer he puts on those woolen uniforms, with a velvet three-cornered hat and gloves, and you never see a drop of sweat on his forehead. He didn’t sweat if he didn’t want to. But when he was alone, when he was doing his exercises, he gave permission to his body to perspire. Recently, during this difficult time, with so many problems, he had denied himself his horses. Maybe this week he’d go to. San Cristóbal. He’d ride alone, under the trees, along the river, like in the old days, and feel rejuvenated. Not even a woman’s arms are as affectionate as the back of a chestnut.

    He stopped rowing when he felt a cramp in his left arm. He wiped his face and looked down at his pants, at his fly. Nothing. It was still dark outside. The trees and shrubs in the gardens of Radhamés Manor were inky stains under a clear sky crowded with twinkling lights. What was that line of Neruda’s that the moralist’s babbling friends liked so much? And stars tremble blue in the distance. Those old women trembled when they dreamed that some poet would scratch their itch. And all they had near at hand was Chirinos, that Frankenstein. Again he laughed out loud, something that did not happen very often these days.

    He undressed and, wearing slippers and a robe, went to the bathroom to shave. He turned on the radio. They read the newspapers on the Dominican Voice and Caribbean Radio. Until a few years ago the news bulletins had begun at five. But when his brother Petán, the owner of the Dominican Voice, found out that he woke at four, he moved the newscasts up an hour. The other stations followed suit. They knew he listened to the radio while he shaved, bathed, and dressed, and they were painstakingly careful.

    The Dominican Voice, after a jingle for El Conde Hotel Restaurant announcing a night of dancing to Los Colosos del Ritmo under the direction of Maestro Gatón and featuring the singer Johnny Ventura, highlighted the Julia Molina Widow of Trujillo Prize to the Most Prolific Mother. The winner, Doña Alejandrina Francisco, who had twenty-one living children, declared when she received the medal with the portrait of the Sublime Matriarch: My twenty-one children will give their lives for the Benefactor if they are asked to.

    I don’t believe you, bitch.

    He had brushed his teeth and now he was shaving as meticulously as he always had, ever since he was a kid in a shantytown in San Cristóbal. Back when he didn’t even know if his poor mother, to whom the entire country now paid homage on Mother’s Day (A wellspring of loving-kindness and mother of the preeminent man who governs us, said the announcer), would have beans and rice that night to feed the eight mouths in her family. Cleanliness, caring for his body and his clothing, had been, for him, the only religion he practiced faithfully.

    After another long list of visitors to the home of Mama Julia, to whom they would pay their respects on Mother’s Day (poor old woman, serenely receiving a caravan of schools, associations, institutes, unions, and thanking them in her faint little voice for their flowers and courtesy), the attacks began on Bishops Reilly and Panal, who neither were born under our sun nor suffered under our moon (Nice, he thought), and who meddle in our civil and political life, overstepping the bounds into the terrain of the criminal. Johnny Abbes wanted to go into Santo Domingo Academy and drag the Yankee bishop out of his refuge. What can happen, Chief? The gringos will protest, naturally. Haven’t they protested everything for a long time now? Galíndez, Murphy the pilot, the Mirabal sisters, the attempt on Betancourt, and a thousand other things. It doesn’t matter if the dogs bark in Caracas, Puerto Rico, Washington, New York, Havana. What happens here is what matters. The crows in their cassocks won’t stop conspiring until they’ve been scared out of it. No. It wasn’t time yet to settle the score with Reilly or that other son of a bitch, that shitty little Spaniard Bishop Panal. The time would come, they would pay. His instincts never deceived him. For now he wouldn’t touch a hair on their heads, even if they kept fucking with him, like they’d been doing since Sunday, January 24, 1960—a year and a half already!—when the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter was read at every Mass, inaugurating the campaign of the Catholic Church against the regime. Backbiters! Crows! Eunuchs! Doing that to him, a man who had been decorated in the Vatican by Pius XII with the Great Cross of the Papal Order of St. Gregory. On the Dominican Voice, Paíno Pichardo, in a speech delivered the night before in his capacity as Minister of the Interior and Religious Practice, recalled that the state had spent sixty million pesos on the Church, whose bishops and priests are now doing so much harm to the Catholic faithful of the Dominican Republic. He turned the dial. On Caribbean Radio they were reading a letter of protest from hundreds of workers because their signatures had not been included on the Great National Manifesto against the disturbing machinations of Bishop Thomas Reilly, a traitor to God, Trujillo, and his own manhood, who, instead of remaining in his diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, ran like a scared rat to hide in Ciudad Trujillo behind the skirts of American nuns at Santo Domingo Academy, a vipers’ nest of terrorism and conspiracy. When he heard that the Ministry of Education had deprived Santo Domingo Academy of its accreditation because the foreign nuns were in collusion with the terrorist plotting of the Bishops of San Juan de la Maguana and La Vega against the State, he turned back to the Dominican Voice in time to hear the announcer report another victory for the Dominican polo team in Paris, where, on the beautiful field of Bagatelle, after defeating the Leopards five to four and dazzling the assembled connoisseurs, it was awarded the Aperture Cup. Ramfis and Radhamés, the most applauded players. A lie, to beguile Dominicans. And him. In the pit of his stomach he felt the rush of acid that attacked every time he thought about his sons, those successful failures, those disappointments. Playing polo in Paris and fucking French girls while their father was fighting the battle of his life!

    He dried his face. His blood turned to vinegar whenever he thought of his sons. By God, it wasn’t his fault. His line was healthy, he was a sire of thoroughbreds. The proof was there, in the children his seed had created in other wombs, in the belly of Lina Lovatón, for instance: robust, energetic men, a thousand times more deserving of the place occupied by those two drones, a pair of nonentities named after characters in an opera. Why had he allowed the Bountiful First Lady to give his sons names out of Aida, that damn opera she saw in New York? Those names had brought them bad luck, turned them into operetta buffoons instead of real men. Bums, idlers without character or ambition, all they were good for was getting drunk. They took after his brothers, not him; they were as useless as Blacky, Petán, Peepee, Aníbal, that collection of crooks, parasites, derelicts, and losers. None of them had a millionth of his energy, his will, his vision. What would happen to this country when he died? He was sure Ramfis wasn’t even as good in bed as all the asslickers said he was. So he fucked Kim Novak! He fucked Zsa Zsa Gabor! He stuck it to Debra Paget and half the actresses in Hollywood! Big deal. If he gave them Mercedes-Benzes, Cadillacs, mink coats, even Crazy Valeriano would be fucking Miss Universe and Elizabeth Taylor. Poor Ramfis. He suspected that his son didn’t even like women very much. He liked the appearance, he liked people to say he was the best lover in the country, better even than Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican known all over the world for the size of his prick and his prowess as an international cocksman. Was the Great Fucking Machine playing polo with his sons on the field of Bagatelle? The fondness he had felt for Porfirio ever since he’d joined his corps of military adjutants, a feeling he still had despite the failed marriage to his oldest daughter, Flor de Oro, improved his mood. Porfirio had ambition and he had fucked great cunts, from the Frenchwoman Danielle Darrieux to the multimillionaire Barbara Hutton, without giving them so much as a bouquet of flowers; instead he squeezed them and became rich at their expense.

    He filled the tub with bath salts and bubbles and sank into the water with the same intense satisfaction he felt every dawn. Porfirio always led the good life. His marriage to Barbara Hutton lasted a month, the indispensable time for getting a million dollars from her in cash and another million in property. If Ramfis or Radhamés were at least like Porfirio! That walking cock spurted ambition. And, like every conquering hero, he had enemies. They were always coming to him with gossip, advising him to get Rubirosa out of the diplomatic service because the scandals were a stain on the national image. They were jealous. What better propaganda for the Dominican Republic than a cocksman like him? From the time of his marriage to Flor de Oro, they had wanted him to tear off the head of the mulatto fuck who’d seduced his daughter and won his admiration. He wouldn’t do it. He knew who the traitors were, he could smell them out before they even knew they were going to betray him. That’s why he was still alive and so many Judases were rotting in La Cuarenta, La Victoria, on Beata Island, in the bellies of sharks, or fattening Dominican earthworms. Poor Ramfis, poor Radhamés. Just as well that Angelita had some character and stayed with him.

    He got out of the tub and took a fast shower. The contrast between hot and cold water revitalized him. Now he was full of energy. As he applied deodorant and talc, he listened to Caribbean Radio, which expressed the ideas and slogans of the malevolent brain, his name for Johnny Abbes when he was in a good

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1