The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

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.”

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!

Why had he allowed the Bountiful First Lady to give his sons names out of Aida, that damn opera she saw in New York?

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.

Starting on that black January 24 in 1960, exactly sixteen months ago, they fucked with him every day. Letters, memorials, Masses, novenas, sermons. Everything those shits in cassocks said and did against him resonated overseas, where the newspapers, radios, and televisions talked of Trujillo’s imminent fall now that “the Church had turned its back on him.”

Wasn’t the Galician traitor José Almoina a corpse in Mexico? And the Basque Jesús de Galíndez, another serpent who bit the hand that fed him? And Ramón Marrero Aristy, who thought that because he was a famous author he could write articles in The New York Times against the government that paid for his drunken binges, his books, his whores?

The head of the Military Intelligence Service, the SIM, grimaced: “Too late, Excellency. We threw them to the sharks yesterday. Alive, just as you ordered.”

When his hair was combed and he had touched up the ends of the thin brush mustache he had worn for twenty years, he powdered his face generously until he had hidden under a delicate whitish cloud the dark tinge of the Haitian blacks who were his maternal ancestors, something he had always despised on other people’s skin, and on his own.

A guard came in with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red (“The brand I prefer because Juanito Caminante’s my namesake,” the colonel joked),

The three men had begun to smoke, and the head of the SIM spoke of how important it was not to allow the enemy within to raise his head, to crush him every time he attempted to act. “Because as long as the enemy within is weak and disunited, it doesn’t matter what the foreign enemy does. Let the United States holler, let the OAS kick, let Venezuela and Costa Rica howl, they can’t do us any harm. In fact, they unite Dominicans like a fist around the Chief.”

Your little girl was left behind to dress the saints. That’s what you used to say about unmarried women:

But in my bedroom, only Dominican books. Testimonies, essays, memoirs, lots of histories. Can you guess the period? The Trujillo Era, what else? The most important thing that happened to us in five hundred years. You used to say that with so much conviction. It’s true, Papa. During those thirty-one years, all the evil we had carried with us since the Conquest became crystallized.

The truth is, I don’t love Lupe and she doesn’t love me. At least not in the way people understand love. We’re united by something stronger. Dangers shared shoulder to shoulder, staring death in the face. And lots of blood, on both of us.” The Benefactor nodded. He understood what he meant. He would have liked to have a wife like that hag, damn it. He wouldn’t have felt so alone when he had to make certain decisions. It was true, there were no ties like blood. That must be why he felt so tied to this country of ingrates, cowards, and traitors. Because in order to pull it out of backwardness, chaos, ignorance, and barbarism, he had often been stained with blood. Would these assholes thank him for it in the future?

“My hand does not tremble when I have to kill,” he added, after a pause. “Governing sometimes demands that you become stained with blood. I’ve often had to do that for this country. But I am a man of honor. I do justice to those who are loyal, I don’t have them killed.

Trujillo was dumbfounded: was it possible that the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of the people who had benefited most from the regime were plotting against him? They were shown no consideration despite their family names, white faces, and middle-class trappings.

I missed a chance too, with a doctor who was rolling in money. He was crazy about me. But he was dark-skinned, they said his mother was Haitian. I’m not prejudiced, but suppose my child was a throwback and came out black as coal?”

When she sees her walking away in her flowered dress, along a street boiling in the sun, where the response to frantic barking is the cackling of hens, she is filled with anguish. What are you doing here? What have you come to find in Santo Domingo, in this house?

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.

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.

You didn’t seem like a womanizer. Did power satisfy you so much you didn’t need sex?

“Nothing attracts black flesh more than white. Haitian violations of Dominican women are an everyday occurrence.”

“They never trembled,” Trujillo repeated, displaying his hands again. “Because I gave the order to kill only when it was absolutely necessary for the good of the country.”

“I read somewhere, Your Excellency, that you ordered the soldiers to use machetes, not guns. Was that to save ammunition?”

“If they only used machetes, the operation could appear to be a spontaneous action by campesinos, without government intervention. We Dominicans are lavish, we’ve never skimped on anything, least of all ammunition.”

The Army obeyed orders. We began to separate the illegals from the others. But the people wouldn’t let us. Everybody began to hunt down Haitians. Campesinos, merchants, and officials revealed their hiding places, and they hung them and beat them to death. They burned them, sometimes. In many places, the Army had to intervene to stop the excesses.

With the time he had wasted filling in the deep holes that opened before the feet of his horde of relatives, he could have built a second country.

Again he read every word, every syllable, of the letter in “The Public Forum.” It undoubtedly had been fabricated by the Constitutional Sot, a pen pusher who delighted in sneak attacks but only when ordered by the Chief; nobody would dare to write, let alone publish, a letter like this without Trujillo’s authorization. When was the last time he saw him? The day before yesterday, on his walk. He hadn’t been called to walk beside him, the Chief spent the whole time talking to General Román and General Espaillat, but he greeted him with the customary civility. Or did he? He sharpened his memory. Had he noticed a certain hardness in that fixed, intimidating gaze, which seemed to tear through appearances and reach deep into the soul of the person he was scrutinizing? A certain dryness when he responded to his greeting? The beginning of a frown? No, he didn’t remember anything unusual.

“You know very well what’s going on, Egghead, don’t be stupid. Didn’t you realize that three or four days ago the papers stopped calling you a ‘distinguished gentleman’ and demoted you to ‘señor’?”

Well, that’s what politics is, you make your way over corpses.”

“Don’t tell me. Convince him. I already know. Don’t be discouraged. You know how he is. Basically, a magnanimous man. A deep sense of justice. If he weren’t suspicious, he wouldn’t have lasted thirty-one years. There’s been a mistake, a misunderstanding. It ought to be resolved. Ask him for an audience. He knows how to listen.”

The U.S.S.R. and its satellites will never accept a rapprochement with the Dominican Republic, the bulwark of anti-Communism in Latin America. The United States won’t accept it either. Do you want another eight years of American occupation? We have to come to some understanding with Washington or it will mean the end of the regime.”

In order to rebuild bridges to the hierarchy, the Vatican, and the priests—the immense majority of whom still supported the regime out of fear of atheistic Communism—it was indispensable that this daily campaign of accusations and diatribes end, or at least become more moderate, for it allowed their enemies to portray the regime as anti-Catholic.

She had always been a very good woman, this illegitimate daughter of Haitian immigrants to San Cristóbal, whose features he and his siblings had inherited, something that never failed to mortify him despite his great love for her. Sometimes, however, at the Hipódromo, the Country Club, or Fine Arts, when he saw all the aristocratic Dominican families paying him homage, he would think mockingly: “They’re licking the ground for a descendant of slaves.” How was the Sublime Matriarch to blame for the black blood that ran in her veins?