The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Furthermore, as proof that the regime considers the De la Mazas a loyal family, this morning you have been granted the concession for highway construction between Santiago and Puerto Plata.”

  He paused again, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, and concluded with a phrase that also said the interview had ended:

  “In this way you’ll be able to help Octavio’s widow. Poor Altagracia must be having a difficult time. Give her my best, and your parents too.”

  Antonio left the National Palace more stupefied than if he had been drinking all night. Had that been him? Had he heard with his own ears what that son of a bitch said? Had he accepted explanations from Trujillo, even a business deal, a mess of pottage that would allow him to pocket thousands of pesos, so that he would swallow his bitterness and become an accomplice—yes, an accomplice—to Tavito’s murder? Why hadn’t he dared even to accuse him, to say he knew very well that the body thrown at his sister-in-law’s door had been murdered on his orders, like Murphy before him, and that he had also created, with his melodramatic mind, the masquerade of the gringo pilot’s homosexuality and Tavito’s remorse for having killed him.

  Instead of returning to Moca that morning, Antonio, without really knowing how, found himself in a cheap cabaret, El Bombillo Rojo, at the corner of Vicente Noble and Barahona, whose owner, Loco Frías, organized dance contests. He consumed vast quantities of rum, lost in thought, hearing as if from a distance merengues with a Cibao flavor (“San Antonio,” “Con el Alma,” “Juanita Morel,” “Jarro Pichao,” among others), and at a certain moment, without any explanation, he tried to hit the maracas player in the band. His drunkenness blurred the target, he punched the air, fell to the floor, and could not get up again.

  When he reached Moca a day later, pale, exhausted, and with his clothes in ruins, his father, Don Vicente, his brother, Ernesto, his mother, and his wife, Aída, were in the family house, waiting for him, horrified. It was his wife who spoke in a trembling voice:

  “Everybody’s saying that Trujillo shut you up with the highway from Santiago to Puerto Plata. I don’t know how many people have called.”

  Antonio remembered his surprise when he heard Aída rebuke him in front of his parents and Ernesto. She was the model Dominican wife, quiet, obliging, long-suffering, who put up with his drunkenness, his affairs with women, his fighting, the nights he spent away from home, and always welcomed him with a smile, raising his spirits, willing to believe his excuses when he bothered to give her any, and finding comfort in Mass every Sunday, in novenas, confessions, and prayers, for the troubles that filled her life.

  “I couldn’t let myself be killed just for the sake of a gesture,” he said, dropping into the old rocking chair where Don Vicente nodded off at siesta time. “I pretended I believed his explanations, that I let myself be bought off.”

  He spoke, feeling the weariness of centuries, the eyes of his wife, of Ernesto and his parents, burning into his brain.

  “What else could I do? Don’t think badly of me, Papa. I swore I’d avenge Tavito. I’ll do it, Mama. You’ll never have to be ashamed of me again, Aída. I swear it. I swear it again, to all of you.”

  Any moment now he would keep his oath. In ten minutes, or one, the Chevrolet would appear, the one the old fox used every week to go to Mahogany House in San Cristóbal, and, according to their carefully drawn plan, the murderer of Galíndez, of Murphy, Tavito, and the Mirabal sisters, of thousands of Dominicans, would fall, cut to ribbons by the bullets of another of his victims, Antonio de la Maza, whom Trujillo had also killed with a method that was slower and more perverse than when he had his prey shot, beaten to death, or fed to the sharks. He had killed him in stages, taking away his decency, his honor, his self-respect, his joy in living, his hopes and desires, turning him into a sack of bones tormented by the guilty conscience that had been destroying him gradually for so many years.

  “I’m going to stretch my legs,” he heard Salvador Estrella Sadhalá say. “They’re cramped from sitting so long.”

  He saw Turk get out of the car and take a few steps along the edge of the highway. Was Salvador feeling as much anguish as he? No doubt about it. And Tony Imbert and Amadito as well. And, up ahead, Roberto Pastoriza, Huáscar Tejeda, and Pedro Livio Cedeño. Gnawed by the fear that something or someone would prevent the Goat from keeping this appointment. But it was with him that Trujillo had old accounts that needed to be settled. He had not harmed any of his six companions, any of the dozens of others who, like Juan Tomás Díaz, were involved in the conspiracy, as much as he had harmed Antonio. He looked through the window: Turk was shaking each leg energetically. He could see that Salvador held his revolver in his hand. He watched him return to the car and take his place in the back seat, next to Amadito.

  “Well, if he doesn’t come we’ll go to the Pony and have a cold beer,” he heard him say morosely.

  After their fight, he and Salvador did not see each other for months. They would both be at the same social gathering and not say hello. Their break heightened the torment in which he lived. When the conspiracy was fairly well developed, Antonio had the courage to show up at 21 Mahatma Gandhi and go directly to the living room where Salvador was sitting.

  “It’s useless for us to scatter our efforts,” he said by way of greeting. “Your plans to kill the Goat are childish. You and Imbert should join us. Our plan is worked out and can’t fail.”

  Salvador looked into his eyes and said nothing. He made no hostile gesture and did not throw him out of his house.

  “I have the support of the gringos,” Antonio explained, lowering his voice. “I’ve spent two months discussing the details at the embassy. Juan Tomás Díaz has also been talking to Consul Dearborn’s people. They’ll give us weapons and explosives. We have high-ranking officers involved. You and Tony should join us.”

  “There are three of us,” Turk said finally. “Amadito García Guerrero became part of it a few days ago.”

  Their reconciliation was only relative. They had not had another serious argument during the months when the plan to kill Trujillo was made, unmade, remade, with a different form and a different date every month, every week, every day, because of the vacillations of the Yankees. The planeload of weapons originally promised by the embassy was reduced, in the end, to three rifles that were given to him not long ago by his friend Lorenzo D. Berry, the owner of Wimpy’s Supermarket, who, to his astonishment, turned out to be the CIA’s man in Ciudad Trujillo. In spite of these cordial meetings, when the only topic was the plan in perpetual transformation, the old, fraternal communication was not reestablished between them—the jokes and confidences, the interweaving of shared intimacies that existed, Antonio knew, among Turk, Imbert, and Amadito, and from which he had been excluded ever since the argument. Another piece of misery to hold the Goat responsible for: he had lost his friend forever.

  His three companions in the car, and the other three waiting up ahead, may have been the people who knew least about the conspiracy. It was possible they suspected certain other accomplices, but if something went wrong and they fell into Johnny Abbes García’s hands, and the caliés took them to La Cuarenta and subjected them to their usual tortures, then Turk, Imbert, Amadito, Huáscar, Pastoriza, and Pedro Livio would not be able to implicate too many people. General Juan Tomás Díaz, Luis Amiama Tió, two or three others. They knew almost nothing about the rest, who included the most important figures in the government, Pupo Román, for example—head of the Armed Forces, the regime’s number-two man—and myriad ministers, senators, civilian officials, and high-ranking military officers who were informed about their plans, had participated in their preparation or knew about them indirectly, and had let it be known or understood or guessed through intermediaries (as in the case of Balaguer himself, the theoretical President of the Republic) that once the Goat was eliminated, they would be prepared to cooperate in the political rebuilding, the eradication of the last dregs of Trujillism, the opening, the civilian-military
junta that, with the support of the United States, would guarantee order, block the Communists, call for elections. Would the Dominican Republic finally be a normal country, with an elected government, a free press, a system of justice worthy of the name? Antonio sighed. He had worked so hard for that and still he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. In fact, he was the only one who knew like the back of his hand the entire web of names and complicities. Often, as one infuriating secret conversation followed another, and everything they had done collapsed and they had to start building again out of nothing, he had felt exactly like a spider at the center of a labyrinth of threads that he himself had spun, trapping a crowd of individuals who did not know each other. He was the only one who knew them all. Only he knew each person’s degree of involvement. And there were so many! Not even he could remember how many now. It was a miracle that with this country being what it was, and the Dominicans being how they were, there had been no betrayal to wreck the entire scheme. Perhaps God was on their side, as Salvador believed. The precautions had worked, all the others knowing very little except their final objective, not knowing the means, the circumstances, the moment. No more than three or four people knew that the seven of them were here tonight, knew whose hands would execute the Goat.

  Sometimes he was overwhelmed at the thought that if Johnny Abbes arrested him, he would have the only one who could identify everyone involved. He was determined not to be captured alive, to save the last bullet for himself. And he had also taken the precaution of concealing in the hollow heel of his shoe a strychnine-based poison pill prepared for him by a pharmacist in Moca, who thought it was for killing a wild dog that had been wreaking havoc in the henhouses on the ranch. They wouldn’t get him alive, he wouldn’t give Johnny Abbes the pleasure of watching him writhe in the electric chair. When Trujillo was dead, it would be a real pleasure to finish off the head of the SIM. There would be more than enough volunteers. Most likely, when he found out about the Chief’s death, Abbes would disappear. He must have made plans; he had to know how much he was hated, how many people wanted revenge. Not only the opposition; ministers, senators, members of the military said so openly.

  Antonio lit another cigarette and smoked, biting down on the tip to relieve his tension. Traffic had stopped altogether; for some time not a truck or a car had passed in either direction.

  The truth was, he said to himself, exhaling smoke from his mouth and nose, he didn’t give a shit what happened later. The crucial thing was what happened now. Seeing him dead so he would know that his life had not been useless, that he hadn’t passed through this world like a worthless creature.

  “That bastard is never coming, damn it,” a furious Tony Imbert exclaimed beside him.

  7

  The third time that Urania insists he take a mouthful, the invalid opens his mouth. When the nurse returns with the glass of water, Señor Cabral is relaxed and, as if distracted, docilely accepts the mouthfuls of pap his daughter offers him, and drinks half a glass of water in little sips. A few drops roll down to his chin. The nurse wipes his face carefully.

  “Good, very good, you ate up your fruit like a good boy,” she congratulates him. “You’re happy with the surprise your daughter gave you, aren’t you, Señor Cabral?”

  The invalid does not deign to look at her.

  “Do you remember Trujillo?” Urania asks the nurse point-blank.

  The woman stares at her, disconcerted. She is wide in the hips, sour-looking, with prominent eyes. Her hair, dyed a rusty blond, is dark at the roots. At last she responds:

  “How would I remember? I was only four or five when he was killed. I don’t remember anything except what I heard in my house. I know your papa was a very important man in those days.”

  Urania nods.

  “Senator, minister, everything,” she murmurs. “But, in the end, he fell into disgrace.”

  The old man looks at her in alarm.

  “Well, I mean”—the nurse is trying to be agreeable—“he might have been a dictator and everything else they say about him, but people seemed to live better back then. Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime. Isn’t that right, señorita?”

  “If my father can understand you, he must be happy to hear you say that.”

  “Of course he understands me,” says the nurse, who is already at the door. “Don’t you, Señor Cabral? Your papa and I have long conversations. All right, just call if you need me.”

  She goes out, closing the door.

  Perhaps it was true that because of the disastrous governments that came afterward, many Dominicans missed Trujillo now. They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. “Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.”

  “There was crime, Papa.” She looks into the invalid’s eyes, and he begins to blink. “Maybe there weren’t so many thieves breaking into houses, or so many muggers on the streets grabbing wallets, watches, and necklaces. But people were killed and beaten and tortured, people disappeared. Even the people closest to the regime. His son, for instance, the handsome Ramfis, he committed endless abuses. How you trembled at the thought of him noticing me!”

  Her father did not know, because Urania never told him, that she and her classmates at Santo Domingo Academy, and perhaps all the girls of her generation, dreamed about Ramfis. With his thin mustache in the style of a Mexican movie star, his Ray-Ban sunglasses, his well-tailored suits and the variety of uniforms he wore as head of the Dominican Air Force, his big dark eyes and athletic build, his solid-gold watches and rings and his Mercedes-Benzes, he seemed favored by the gods: rich, powerful, good-looking, healthy, strong, happy. You remember it very clearly: when the sisters couldn’t see or hear you, you and your classmates showed one another your collections of photographs of Ramfis Trujillo, in civilian clothes, in uniform, in a bathing suit, wearing a tie, a sport shirt, a tuxedo, a riding habit, leading the Dominican polo team, or sitting at the controls of his plane. You pretended you had seen him, talked to him at the club, the exhibition, the party, the parade, the charity fair, and when you dared to say it—all of you blushing, nervous, knowing it was a sin in word and thought and that you’d have to confess it to the chaplain—you whispered to each other how wonderful, how marvelous it would be to be loved, kissed, embraced, caressed by Ramfis Trujillo.

  “You can’t imagine how often I dreamed about him, Papa.”

  Her father does not laugh. He gives another little start and opens his eyes wide when he hears the name of Trujillo’s older son. His favorite, and for that very reason, his greatest disappointment. The Father of the New Nation would have liked his firstborn—“Was he his son, Papa?”—to have his appetite for power, to be as energetic and as much of an executive as he was. But Ramfis had inherited none of his virtues or defects, except, perhaps, his frenzied fornicating, his need to take women to bed to convince himself of his own virility. He lacked political ambition, any kind of ambition; he was indolent, prone to depression and neurotic introversion, besieged by complexes, anxieties, and tortuous mood swings, when his behavior zigzagged between hysterical outbursts and long periods of ennui that he drowned in drugs and alcohol.

  “Do you know what the Chief’s biographers say, Papa? That he became like that when he found out his mother wasn’t married to Trujillo when he was born. They say he began to suffer from depression when he learned that his real father was Dr. Dominici, or the Cuban Trujillo had killed, Doña María Martínez’s first lover, back when she never dreamed she’d be the Bountiful First Lady and was just another fast-living party girl they called Españolita. You’re laughing? I don’t believe it!”

  He may be laughing. Or it may merely be his facial muscles relaxing. In any case, this is not the face of someone enjoying himself but of a person who has just yawned or howled and is left slack-jawed, with eyes half closed, nostrils dilated, gullet wide, revealing a dark, toothless hole.

  “Do you want me to call the
nurse?”

  The invalid closes his mouth, puffs out his face, and recovers his attentive, alarmed expression. He remains motionless, shrunken and waiting. Urania is distracted by the sudden clamor of shrieking parrots that fills the bedroom, then stops as suddenly as it began. The brilliant sun shines on roofs and windowpanes and begins to heat the room.

  “Do you know something? Despite all the hatred I had, and still have, for your Chief, and his family, and everything that smells of Trujillo, when I think of Ramfis or read something about him, I can’t help feeling sad; I’m sorry for the man.”

  He had been a monster like everyone else in that family of monsters. What else could he have been, being his father’s son, brought up and educated as he was? What else could the son of Heliogabalus, or Caligula, or Nero have been? What else could a boy have been who, at the age of seven, was named a colonel in the Dominican Army by decree—“Did you present him in Congress or was it Senator Chirinos, Papa?”—and promoted at the age often to general, in a public ceremony the diplomatic corps was obliged to attend at which all the top-ranking military paid him homage? Etched in Urania’s mind is a photograph in the album that her father kept in an armoire in the living room—can it still be there?—showing the elegant Senator Agustín Cabral (“Or were you a minister then, Papa?”), wearing an impeccable swallowtail coat under a brutal sun, bent in a respectful bow as he greets the boy in the general’s uniform, who, standing on a small canopied podium, has just reviewed the troops and is accepting congratulations from a line of ministers, legislators, and ambassadors. At the rear of the platform, the smiling faces of the Benefactor and the Bountiful First Lady, his proud mama.