Dominican Republic: The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Feast of the Goat describes the Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic in the same way that one would examine oneself in a three-way mirror: simultaneously looking at different perspective of the same object. Vargas Llosa presents us with these concurrent tripartite reflections coming from Urania Cabral, from the conspirators who killed Trujillo on March 30^th, 1961, and from Trujillo, the Goat itself. 

Urania Cabral is the daughter of Agustín Cabral, a member of Trujillo’s inner circle. She comes back to the Dominican Republic after an abrupt separation from her country that lasted 35 years. Her return prompts her to confess to her relatives how her father gave her, his only child, as an offering in the sacrificial stone to Trujillo. Urania, whose name is as exuberant as the Dominican landscape, music, cuisine, and passions, is the symbolic recipient of the gruesome kind of love Trujillo felt towards his country and the portrayal of the denial, forgetfulness, and resentment that frame these years for a share of the Dominican people.

Simultaneous to Urania’s confessions throughout the book, the men waiting for the car transporting Trujillo are remembering their own paths, all of which rendezvous at the finish line with the decision to end the life of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, El Generalisimo. Vargas Llosa renders the killers of Trujillo in all the splendor of their humanity, dissecting with his pen their flaws, virtues, vices, emotions, and rationale. Each character is a masterpiece; Vargas Llosa takes a photograph of each of their souls and translates it to prose, one by one.

The third perspective comes from an account of the events of Trujillo’s last day. Each of his actions revealing his obsession with cleanliness, his devoutness to discipline, his despise for the Haitian ethnicity he shared as maternal inheritance, his cult to his personality, his ability to infuse fear and terror, his unbearable and penetrating gaze, and his disappointment on all the members of his family. Trujillo’s last days were full of frustration and irony; El Generalisimo’s will was law in the Dominican Republic, but his own body was contravening him through his withered virility and the ultimate humiliation of his incontinence.

After El Generalissimo died, Ramfis Trujillo, his illegitimate son, led a fierce revenge against all that were suspected in the assassination of his father. It hurts the description of these tortures, slaughters, intimidations, and carnages, some of the most graphic I have encountered in a book. Despite the violent bloodshed, it is one of those books that cannot be put down, and that cannot be forgotten.

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