The Feast of the Goat

Urania Cabral and her father Agustín Cabral appear in both the modern day and historical portions of the novel. In the year 1996, Urania returns to the Dominican Republic for the first time since her departure at the age of 14. She is a successful New York lawyer who has spent most of the past 35 years trying to overcome the traumas of her childhood, a goal she pursues through an academic fascination with Trujillo and Dominican history. Urania is deeply troubled by the events of her past, and is compelled to confront her father Agustín about his role in those events. Urania visits her father, finding him weakened by age and a severe stroke, so much so that he is barely able to respond physically to her presence, let alone speak. Agustín listens helplessly as Urania recounts his past as "Egghead Cabral", a high-ranking member of Trujillo's inner circle, and his drastic fall from grace. Urania details Agustín's role in the events that led to her rape by the Dominican leader, and subsequent lifetime of celibacy and emotional trauma.[11] Agustín's character in the modern day portion of the novel serves primarily as a sounding board for Urania's recollections of the Trujillo era, and the events that surrounded both Agustín Cabral's disgrace and Urania's escape from the country. His responses are usually minimal or non-vocal, despite the ardency of Urania's accusations and the enormity of his own actions during Trujillo's reign.

The Dominican Republic's dictator, and the central figure of The Feast of the Goat, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo

Rafael Trujillo, known also as The Goat, The Chief, and The Benefactor, is a fictionalized character based on the real dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and the official President of the Republic from 1930 to 1938 and 1943 to 1952.[12] In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa imagines the innermost thoughts of the dictator, and retells the Goat's last hours from his own perspective.[13] Trujillo's character struggles with aging and the physical problems of incontinence and impotence.[14] Through fictional events and first person narrative, the reader is given insight into the man who, during his "thirty-one years of horrendous political crimes",[7] modernized the country's infrastructure and military, but whose regime's attack against its enemies overseas (particularly the attempted assassination of Rómulo Betancourt, president of Venezuela) led to the imposition of economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States in the 1950s.[15] The resultant economic downturn, in conjunction with other factors, leads to the CIA supported assassination plot that ended Trujillo's life on May 30, 1961.[12]

Trujillo's regime is supported by Johnny Abbes García, the head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), a brutal man to whom many "disappearances, ... executions, ... sudden falls into disgrace"[16] are attributed. Abbes and his intelligence officers are notorious for their cruelty, particularly their habit of killing dissidents by throwing them into shark-infested waters.[17] Colonel Abbes "may be the devil, but he's useful to the Chief; everything bad is attributed to him and only the good to Trujillo".[18] Trujillo's son, Ramfis Trujillo, is a loyal supporter of the Chief. After unsuccessful attempts at schooling in the United States, Ramfis returns to the Dominican Republic to serve in his father's military. He's a well-known womanizer. Upon Trujillo's death, Ramfis seeks revenge, even going so far as to torture and kill his uncle by marriage, General Jose Roman, for his part in the assassination conspiracy.

Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's puppet president is also a supporter, and initially his seemingly innocuous character holds no real power. Following Trujillo's death, the calm and serenity of Balaguer bring about real change in his character, and General Román comments that "this insignificant man whom everyone had always considered a mere clerk, a purely decorative figure in the regime, began to acquire surprising authority".[19] It's Balaguer who guides much of the action in the last sections of the book.

The storyline concerning the assassination primarily follows the four conspirators who directly participate in Trujillo's death. Antonio Imbert Barrera is one of the few conspirators who survives the violent reprisals that follow Trujillo's assassination. Imbert is a politician who becomes disillusioned with the deception and cruelty of Trujillo's regime. His first plan to kill Trujillo was foiled by the unsuccessful attempted overthrow of the regime by Cuban paramilitary forces. Now convinced of the difficulty of his task, Imbert joins the other conspirators in plotting Trujillo's death. Among the others is Antonio de la Maza, one of Trujillo's personal guards. Antonio's brother is killed as part of a government cover-up and Antonio swears revenge upon Trujillo. Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, known as "Turk", is a devout Catholic who, in indignation at the regime's many crimes against God, swears an oath against Trujillo. Turk eventually turns himself in for fear that the regime was torturing his family. Both Turk and his innocent brother are then tortured for months. His father remains loyal to Trujillo and disowns Turk in his face. Despite all of this, Turk refuses to commit suicide and doesn't lose faith in God. He is later executed by Ramfis and other high level government men. Turk's close friend, Amado García Guerrero, known as Amadito, is a Lieutenant in the army who gave up his beloved as proof of his loyalty to Trujillo, and then later was forced to kill her brother to prove himself to Trujillo. Amadito's disgust with himself and disillusionment with the regime lead to his decision to help kill Trujillo. Following the assassination, he hides out with de la Maza and dies fighting. In the aftermath of the assassination, Amadito and Antonio de la Maza choose to fight the members of SIM who come to arrest them, opting to die in battle rather than be captured and tortured.

The structure of Dominican society was hierarchical, with strongly gendered roles. Rafael Trujillo, the ruler, was a cruel dictator who haunts the people of Santo Domingo even 35 years after his death. He is a true caudillo, ruling with brutality and corruption. He creates a personality cult in his capitalist society and encourages decadence within his regime.[21] Prior to their promotion for a position of responsibility, an officer is required to pass a "test of loyalty".[22] His people must remain loyal to him all cost. Their obedience is periodically tested by public humiliation and censure, even though acts of disloyalty were rare. Trujillo violates both women and children as an expression of his political/sexual power. In some cases, he sexually assaults the wife or child of his own lieutenants, many of whom still remain blindly loyal.[23] Even the church and military institutions are employed to give women to the tyrant for pleasure.

Many of the assassins had belonged to Trujillo's regime or had at one point been his staunch supporters, only to find their support for him eroded by the state's crimes against its own citizens.[24] Imbert, one of the assassins, sums up this realization in a comment prompted by the murder of the Mirabal sisters: "They kill our fathers, our brothers, our friends. And now they're killing our women. And here we sit, resigned, waiting our turn."[25] In an interview, Vargas Llosa describes the corruption and brutality of Trujillo's regime: "He had more or less all the common traits of a Latin American dictator, but pushed to the extreme. In cruelty, I think he went far far away from the rest—and in corruption, too."[26]

According to literary scholar Peter Anthony Neissa, the two important components of machismo are aggressive behaviour and hyper-sexuality.[27] Aggressive behaviour is exhibited by displays of power and strength, while hyper-sexuality is revealed through sexual activity with as many partners as possible.[28] These two components shape the portrayal of Trujillo and his regime in The Feast of the Goat. As Lorenzo observes, Vargas Llosa "reveals traditions of machismo, of abusive fathers, and of child-rearing practices that repeat the shaming of children, so that each generation bequeaths a withering of the soul to the subsequent one."[20]

In a display of both aspects of machismo, Trujillo demanded that his aides and cabinet provide him with sexual access to their wives or daughters. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote of Trujillo's machismo and treatment of women, "[h]e went to bed with his ministers' wives, not only because he liked these ladies but because it was a way to test his ministers. He wanted to know if they were ready to accept this extreme humiliation. Mainly the ministers were prepared to play this grotesque role—and they remained loyal to Trujillo even after his death."[26] Trujillo's sexual conquests and public humiliations of his enemies also serve to affirm his political power and machismo. In Neissa's words, "The implication is that maximum virility equals political dominance."[29]

Trujillo's attempted sexual conquest of Urania is an example of both political manipulation of Agustín Cabral and sexual power over young women. However, as Trujillo's penis remains flaccid throughout the encounter and he is humiliated in front of the young girl, the encounter fails to satisfy his requirements for machismo.[30]

All of the novel's storylines concern memory in some sense or another. The most apparent confrontation of memory is on the part of Urania Cabral, who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time in 30 years. Soon, Urania is forced to confront her father and the traumas that led her to leave the country at 14. She was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Trujillo himself, a sacrifice her father made to try to gain favor with the dictator again (a fact to which she alludes throughout the book, but which is only revealed at the very end). The book concludes with her recounting the memory of that night to her aunt and cousins, who never knew the true reason she left the country. When her aunt is surprised that she remembers all these details, Urania responds that while she forgets many things, "I remember everything about that night."[31] For Urania, forgetting the atrocities committed by the regime is unacceptable.[32] Her father, on the other hand, is not capable of joining her in this process of remembering, since he has suffered a stroke and is not capable of speaking. However, Urania is angry that he chose to forget these things while he was still capable of acknowledging them.[32]

Memory is also important in the sections of the novel that deal with the assassins. Each recalls the events that led him to take part in the assassination of Trujillo. These incidents included the 1956 Galindez kidnapping and murder, the 1960 murder of the Mirabal sisters, and the 1961 split with the Catholic Church. These historical events are used by Vargas Llosa to connect the assassins with specific moments that demonstrate the violence of Trujillo's regime.[33] Trujillo, too, is shown reflecting on the past, not least his own formation and training at the hands of the US Marines.

But above all, Mario Vargas Llosa uses the fictional Urania to facilitate the novel's attempt at remembering the regime. The novel opens and closes with Urania's story, effectively framing the narrative in the terms of remembering the past and understanding its legacy in the present.[34] In addition, because of her academic study of the history of the Trujillo regime, Urania is also confronting the memory of the regime for the country as a whole.[35] This is in keeping with one purpose of the book, which is to ensure that the atrocities of the dictatorship and the dangers of absolute power will be remembered by a new generation.[36]

In her treatment of the novel, María Regina Ruiz claims that "power gives its wielder the ability to make prohibitions; prohibitions that are reflected in history, the study of which reveals what is and what is not told."[37] The government's actions in The Feast of the Goat demonstrate the discourse of prohibition: foreign newspapers and magazines were prohibited from entering Trujillo's country as they were seen as a threat to the government's ideas. Mario Vargas Llosa takes part in this discourse by recounting what was prohibited.[38]

Ruiz notes that writing also has the power to transform reality. It brings the reader back to the past, allowing the reader to comprehend myths or distorted stories told by historians. Ruiz contends that knowing the past is crucial to one's understanding of the present that takes us to postmodernism, and argues that The Feast of the Goat can thus be seen as a postmodern discourse that gives power to history recreation.[39]

The construction of fictions surrounding the events of Trujillo's regime allow a degree of freedom from the horrors that took places. Author Julia Alvarez contends that these events can "only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination",[40] while Richard Patterson claims that Vargas Llosa "reconfigures, and to a large degree demythologizes" Trujillo and his brutal reign through use of narrative structure.[41] Vargas Llosa's writing acts as a cathartic force for this period in history.