The Feast of the Goat
By Mario Vargas Llosa
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.
You
can tell the book is written by an expert. Despite the heavy (and at
times excruciating - the rape of a pre-teen seems mild in comparison to
some of the horrors described) material you are kept rapt, pressing on
to the inevitable conclusion. The book deals in turn with three
storylines: Urania, a woman returning to the country after 35 years, who
comes to reckon with the past and her family's involvement with the
regime (wholly invented by Vargas Llosa), a collection of
collaborationists, traitors and conspirators, waiting to assassinate the
dictator (real people fictionalized), and the dictator himself,
Trujillo, on what will become the last day of his life (also, obviously
real but fictionalized). There's multiple flashbacks in each story-line and, especially in Urania's story-line, the text will switch abruptly
between present and past conversations with no noticeable delineation.
This is used more heavily in the later chapters, when we have a better
understanding of all the players and plots, but it's still not an easy
book to read.
Since it's not entirely
fictional, there's a need to include certain prominent figures, even
though it can complicate and confuse the reader. There's seven
conspirators waiting for the car, and more who are waiting in the wings.
There's multiple government officials and hangers on. All of these
people are known to each other and in some cases are brothers,
cousins, uncles and nephews. The sections involving Urania's story are
relatively contained in comparison: her, her father, aunt, cousins, and a
nurse, all of whom are made up, are the only characters in the present.
Although I managed to keep most of the large cast straight, I did
struggle, particularly in the last few chapters, at the culmination of
the assassination, when the scope of the plan widened and the ripple
effects began to be seen.
It's also
interesting to note that although the beginning of the book takes each
of the three story-lines in turn, around chapter 19, when we leave Urania
waiting to be delivered to the belly of the beast, several chapters in a
row focus more on the immediate and long term period after the
assassination, and Vargas Llosa instead slots in the finale to Urania's
story as the very last chapter. It's both out of order and
interestingly, Urania's last chapter follows the "Balaguer chapter" which ends, somewhat
optimistically, with the removal of the Trujillo family from the country
and the pardoning of the living conspirators - they literally walk into
Balaguer's open, welcoming arms. Balaguer's chapter is also the last
chronological moment before Urania comes back to the country 35 years
later, which is the start of the book. As tempting as it might have been
to leave it at Balaguer, Vargas Llosa instead returns us back to the
scene of one of Trujillo's final, personal, petty crimes (albeit wholly
fictional one), and reminds us that no matter the events to follow, the
effect of the regime cannot and should be be forgotten - and in the
character of Urania, physically unable to forget, as others in the book
appear to have done.
I think Vargas
Llosa does an incredible job of setting us in the time and place, and in
differentiating between the various narrators, which is something that
can be hard for authors to do. Here, it's immediately apparent when
Urania or Trujillo is narrating, although some of the assassins are not as
easily distinguishable from each other. Although we know what happens to Trujillo (he was in fact, assassinated in May 1961) you anticipate the moment as a reader with some relief of anxiety and joy. After so much detail about the degradation and horrors that Trujillo presided over, you want Trujillo to be done, you want the assassins to succeed, and you know (as someone with access to Wikipedia) that they do. I don't know whether Vargas Llosa assumes knowledge of the outcome on the reader's part. Surely, as it become more and more distant past - it's already been 23 years since the book was first published - fewer and fewer readers can be expected to be familiar with what happens next. Certainly I didn't know, and didn't "spoil" myself. This section was the hardest for me to read, perhaps because it was so immediate, perhaps because it seemed so unjust for an action which should have been celebrated (and in fact was, if only they could have lived long enough to see it). History is written by the victors.
In the end, I am left
with only two questions, both of which come from Urania's fictional
story-line, and which therefore the author has even more deliberately
decided not to address overtly: Who hid the memo (if, in fact it was
deliberately hidden) from Trujillo about Urania's departure? One
reviewer attributes the memo's disappearance to Balaguer as a nod that
no action of Balaguer is ever unconsidered, and states that it is a
demonstration of Vargas Llosa's appreciation for him as a politician, by
showing Balaguer's compassion in that (completely fictional) moment.
That's a compelling argument. I did think that Balaguer, of all the
characters, was probably the hardest to write about, given his outsized
importance to the country later, and the fact that, at the time the book
was written, he was still living and still actively involved in
politics, despite his age and health. It is hard to judge the legacy of a
living person.
My second question was
about the ostracization of Cabral in the first place. Was it just a
loyalty test, as Trujillo seems to allude to in one chapter, or was it
designed with ulterior motives in mind? I also think it's interesting
that Vargas Llosa so clearly lays out the torture and consequences for
those in opposition to the regime in the later chapters. It adds more
layers to Cabral's decision to pimp his daughter out, in his effort to
appease the Generalissimo. There are real, and not imagined,
consequences for angering that type of person. In this case, the choice
was fatal not only due to Trujillo's inability to perform and further
angering him, but also being ultimately pointless given his
assassination weeks later. But would there be a devil on the shoulder to
say that, in the absence of that foresight, Cabral's choice was
unreasonable? When you live in hell, what salve to conscience can you
afford? "In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. 'The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,' he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: 'Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.' Egghead was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will."
It is possibly the best book I never want to read again.
21: A Book Where A Main Character Is A Policitician
