Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has conducted his career as artist and intellectual in a climate--late 20th century Latin America--where art and ideas make material differences and often have a price in blood and death. A failure as a politician--he ran unsuccessfully for president of Peru in 1990--he is one of our greatest and most influential novelists. His new novel confirms his importance. In the world of fiction his continued exploration of the often-perilous intersection of politics and life has enriched 20th century literature. Some of his best novels (“Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” and, most recently, “The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto”) have little to do with anything specifically political, while his indubitable masterpiece, “The War of the End of the World,” removes its political concerns from any contemporary context. His more direct addresses to the politics of his time and region (“The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” “Death in the Andes”) have been somewhat less artistically successful--as if defeated by the enormity of the history which provides their occasion.

One cannot imagine a larger, more awful occasion than that for Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of The Goat”: the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, where the most frightening possibilities of personal dictatorship were made undeniably real. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was, like a number of other Latin American strongmen, trained by the U.S. Marines. In 1927, he became general in chief of the Dominican army and, in 1930, president of the Dominican Republic. For the next 30 years, he exercised absolute power over his country, sometimes as president, always as generalissimo. On May 30, 1961, he was assassinated by members of the Dominican military, acting with some very modest assistance from the CIA. Vargas Llosa’s novel is closely concentrated on this last day of his life.

“The Feast of The Goat” is constructed in three converging plot lines. One follows Trujillo himself from dawn to dark on the day of his death. Another, much more radically compressed, picks up the group of “executioners” (as they were later to be termed) as they wait in their cars on the San Cristobal Highway for Trujillo to pass on his way to an evening of debauchery at his Fundacion Ranch. These two plot lines and all their characters are faithfully and minutely based on the historical record, while the third, along with its characters, is apparently fictional; set 35 years later, it describes the visit of a Dominican exile, Urania Cabral, to her father, Augustin Cabral, once an important figure in the Trujillo regime, to whom she has not spoken since 1961.

This structure seems cumbersome at first. The characters waiting to shoot Trujillo are numerous and don’t have enough time to develop; they have to tell us about themselves through long reflections on their pasts and by reciting exposition to one another. This plot line is crosscut, in the manner of a suspense thriller, with the day-in-the-life narrative following Trujillo toward his meeting with his killers, but since the reader is apt to know that the attempt was successful, the actual suspense is slight. Meanwhile, the crosscutting with Urania’s narrative, as she picks her way toward the revelation of a grisly family secret interred shortly before Trujillo’s death, feels awkwardly contrived. Still, laborious as it seems in the beginning, this difficult structure pays off extremely well in the second half of the book; like Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” “The Feast of the Goat” needs to be read twice through for its design to be fully appreciated.

Vargas Llosa’s characterization of Trujillo is compelling. At 70, he rises at 4 a.m. to exercise fiercely for an hour before dawn. Having ignored a diagnosis of prostate cancer, he has lost control of his bladder and so must keep a change of clothing always near at hand. He is much concerned with his sexual potency, and the assertion of his sexual will is scrambled in his mind with the assertion of his political power. Maintaining his position is a pressing problem for Trujillo on the day of his death.

Conditioned by the U.S. military occupation of his country during his youth, Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo is walking on eggshells to avoid another invasion. Still he seems to have plenty of time for megalomaniacal vagaries. He drags a chief general, Jose Rene “Pupo” Roman, to rub his nose in a leaking sewer pipe outside the San Isidro Air Base--an object lesson in the importance of keeping up appearances. Though his regime is in crisis, Trujillo has spent the last few weeks converting one of his most important cohorts, Augustin Cabral, into a nonperson as a merely capricious “loyalty test.” Such testing brings out the most imaginative sadism of Trujillian terror; one of the executioners, Amado Garcia Guerrero, has been maneuvered into killing the brother of his girlfriend (whom Trujillo refused him permission to marry). The novel bulges with this kind of horror story.

With all of his troglodyte violence, Trujillo has been in some ways progressive. As one of the executioners reflects: “Who around him had not been a Trujillista for the past twenty-five years? They all thought the Goat was the savior of the Nation, the man who ended the caudillo wars, did away with the threat of a new invasion from Haiti, called a halt to a humiliating dependence on the United States ... and, whether they were willing or not, brought the country’s best minds into the government.... [W]hat a perverse system Trujillo created, one in which all Dominicans sooner or later took part as accomplices, a system which only exiles (not always) and the dead could escape.” Therein lies the sick fascination of the story told here: Trujillo’s hideous genius for penetrating not only all the strata but practically all the individuals of the Dominican Republic and binding them to himself.

The system survives its engineer, if briefly. The executioners make their hit, but they depend on Roman to enact a coup and install a civilian-military junta (already tacitly approved by the United States). But Roman is “overcome by a paralysis of his reason and his muscles, by servile obedience and reverence”; the very idea of Trujillo, even after his death, “annihilated him morally.” Roman’s inability to play out his part in the coup causes the whole plot to evaporate and lays the way open to a last bloody spasm of Trujillism without Trujillo. The lucky conspirators go down in various hails of gunfire, while the unlucky ones (including Roman) are tortured to death over a period of months by Trujillo’s degenerate sons, Ramfis and Radhames.

For the long-lasting effects, we have the example of Urania, who finally discloses to her family that she’s been paying her invalid father’s nursing bill only to prolong his suffering. She has been out of contact with her homeland and family and sexually frigid for 35 years, because Augustin Cabral offered her, at the age of 14, as a sexual sacrifice to the “Benefactor,” on the off chance that this gesture might restore him to Trujillo’s favor. Like the outcome of the assassination scheme, this plot point is visible to the reader from a good way off, but it doesn’t lose its shock value.

Urania’s story is the only wholly invented element of the narrative, but it serves as the lens through which the rest must be viewed. And though the analogy of the raped woman to the despoiled country is not new, Vargas Llosa makes something special of it here.

What we are brought to see at the end of this novel is the ultimate horror of the Trujillo regime: Not so much that he raped people’s daughters but that his power was so total and pervasive that he could get people to cooperate, voluntarily, in the raping of their own daughters. His artfulness in turning all Dominicans into accomplices in their own ruin explains why Trujillo seems in some way invulnerable to death and why the terrible wounds he opened in the lives of his people take more than one generation to heal.

In “The Feast of The Goat,” Vargas Llosa paints a portrait that is darkly comic, poignant, admirable and horrifying all at once.