The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “You didn’t tell him anything about this.”

  “Of course not. To be on the safe side, and not to give him false hopes. Suppose it fails?”

  “It won’t fail,” Lieutenant García Guerrero interjected from the back seat. “The Goat is coming.”

  Was he? Tony Imbert looked at his watch. He still might come, no reason to lose hope. He never lost patience, and hadn’t for many years. When he was young he did, unfortunately, and that led him to do things he regretted with every cell in his body. Like the telegram he sent in 1949, crazed with anger at the landing of anti-Trujillistas, led by Horacio Julio Ornes, on the beach at Luperón in the province of Puerto Plata, when he was governor. “Give the order and I’ll burn Puerto Plata, Chief.” The words he regretted most in his life. He saw them printed in every newspaper, for the Generalissimo wanted all Dominicans to know how much of a dedicated, fanatical Trujillista the young governor was.

  Why did Horacio Julio Ornes, Félix Córdoba Boniche, Tulio Hostilio Arvelo, Gugú Henríquez, Miguelucho Feliú, Salvador Reyes Valdéz, Federico Horacio, and the rest choose Puerto Plata on that long-ago June 19 in 1949? The expedition was a resounding failure. One of the two invading airplanes could not even fly the distance and returned to the island of Cozumel. The Catalina, carrying Horacio Julio Ornes and his companions, landed on the water near the muddy coast of Luperón, but before the expeditionary force could climb out, a Coast Guard cutter fired on the plane and destroyed it. In a few hours Army patrols captured the invaders. That permitted the kind of farcical show Trujillo liked so much. He granted amnesty to the prisoners, including Horacio Julio Ornes, and in a show of power and magnanimity allowed them to go into exile again. But as he was making this gesture of generosity for the outside world, the governor of Puerto Plata, Antonio Imbert, and his brother, Major Segundo Imbert, military commander of the province, were stripped of their rank, imprisoned, and beaten, and a merciless reprisal was carried out against supposed accomplices, who were arrested, tortured, and often shot in secret. “Accomplices who weren’t accomplices,” he thinks. “They thought everybody would rise up when they saw them land. In fact, nobody was with them.” Too many innocents had to pay for their fantasy.

  How many innocents would have to pay if tonight’s plan failed? Antonio Imbert was not as optimistic as Amadito or Salvador Estrella Sadhalá when they learned from Antonio de la Maza that General José René (Pupo) Román, head of the Armed Forces, was involved in the plot, they became convinced that once Trujillo was dead, everything would go like clockwork: the military, obeying Román’s orders, would detain the Goat’s brothers, kill Johnny Abbes and the die-hard Trujillistas, and install a civilian-military junta. The people would take to the streets and, overjoyed at gaining their freedom, exterminate the caliés. Would things turn out that way? Disillusionment, ever since the stupid ambush to which Segundo fell victim, had made Antonio Imbert allergic to premature enthusiasm. He wanted to see Trujillo’s corpse lying at his feet; the rest of it mattered less to him. Ridding the country of that man was the main thing. When that obstacle was out of the way, even if things didn’t go so well at first, at least a door would be opened. And that justified what they were doing tonight, even if none of them survived.

  No, Tony had not said a word about the conspiracy to his brother Segundo on his weekly visits to him at La Victoria. They talked about the family, about baseball and boxing, and Segundo told him stories about the prison routine, but they avoided the only important topic. On his last visit, as he was saying goodbye, Antonio whispered: “Things are going to change, Segundo.” A word to the wise. Had he guessed? After a series of crushing blows, Segundo, like Tony, had gone from enthusiastic Trujillista to a man disaffected with the regime to conspirator, and long ago had concluded that the only way to put an end to the tyranny was by killing the tyrant; everything else was useless. You had to eradicate the person in whom all the strands of the dread spiderweb converged.

  “What would have happened if the bomb had exploded on Máximo Gómez when the Goat was taking his walk?” Amadito fantasized.

  “Trujillista fireworks in the sky,” replied Imbert.

  “I could have been one of the firecrackers if I had been on duty,” the lieutenant said with a laugh.

  “I would have sent a huge wreath of roses to your funeral,” said Tony.

  “What a plan,” Estrella Sadhalá remarked. “Blowing up the Goat and all his cronies. Heartless!”

  “Well, I knew you wouldn’t be part of his escort,” said Imbert. “Besides, when that happened I hardly knew you, Amadito. Now I would have to give it a little more thought.”

  “That’s a relief,” said the lieutenant, thanking him.

  They had been waiting on the road to San Cristóbal for more than an hour, and had tried several times to have a conversation, or to joke, as they were doing now, but those efforts had petered out and each man enclosed himself again in his own torments, hopes, or memories. At one point Antonio de la Maza turned on the radio, but as soon as he heard the honeyed voice on the Voice of the Tropics announcing a program on spiritualism, he turned it off.

  Yes, in the failed plan to kill the Goat two and a half years earlier, Antonio Imbert had been prepared to blow up, along with Trujillo, many of the toadies who escorted him every afternoon on his walk from the house of Doña Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, along Máximo Gómez and the Avenida, to the obelisk. Weren’t the men who accompanied him the dirtiest and most bloodstained? It would be a service to the country to eradicate so many of his henchmen at the same time as the tyrant.

  He prepared the assault alone, not even telling his best friend, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, because even though Turk was an anti-Trujillista, Tony was afraid he would disapprove because of his Catholicism. He planned it and thought it out in his own mind, bringing to it all the resources at his disposal, convinced that the fewer the people involved, the greater its chances for success. Not until the final stage did he include in his project two boys from what would later be called the June 14 Movement; at that time, it was a clandestine group of young professionals and students trying to organize in order to take action, though they didn’t know what kind, against tyranny.

  His plan was simple and practical. It took advantage of the maniacal discipline that Trujillo brought to his routine activities, in this case his evening walk along Máximo Gómez and the Avenida. He studied the terrain carefully, going back and forth along the avenue lined with the residences of the regime’s top men, past and present. The ostentatious house of Héctor (Blacky) Trujillo, his brother’s puppet president for two terms. The pink mansion of Mama Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, whom the Chief visited every afternoon before setting out on his walk. The house of Luis Rafael Trujillo Molina, nicknamed Kid, who was mad for cockfights. And the houses of General Arturo (Razor) Espaillat, and of Joaquín Balaguer, the current puppet president, which stood next to the nuncio’s residence. The elegant dwelling that once belonged to Anselmo Paulino was now one of Ramfis Trujillo’s houses. The mansion of the Goat’s daughter, the beautiful Angelita, and her husband, Colonel Luis José (Pechito) León Estévez. The residence of the Cáceres Troncoso family, and the palatial home of the Vicini tycoons. Adjoining Máximo Gómez was a ball field that Trujillo built for his sons across from Radhamés Manor and the lot once occupied by the house of General Ludovino Fernández, whom the Goat had ordered killed. Separating the mansions were large open spaces filled with weeds and protected by green-painted wire fences erected along the edge of the sidewalk. On the right side of the street, where the entourage always walked, there were vacant lots surrounded by the same wire fencing, which Antonio Imbert had spent many hours studying.

  He chose the piece offence that started at Kid Trujillo’s house. On the pretext of replacing part of the fencing around Ready-Mix, the cement factory where he was manager (it belonged to Paco Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady’s brother), he bought several do/en meters of wire fencing and the metal poles that were
placed every fifteen meters to hold the fence taut. He verified personally that the poles were hollow and could be filled with sticks of dynamite. Since Ready-Mix owned two quarries on the outskirts of Ciudad Trujillo, from which raw materials were extracted, it was easy for him, on his periodic visits, to take away sticks of dynamite and hide them in his own office: he always came in before anyone else and left after the last employee had gone home.

  When everything was ready, he told his plan to Luis Gómez Pérez and Iván Tavares Castellanos. Younger than he, they were at the university, studying law and engineering, respectively. They belonged to his cell of the clandestine anti-Trujillista groups; after observing them for many weeks, he decided they were serious, trustworthy, and eager to take action. Both accepted enthusiastically. They agreed not to say a word to their comrades, with whom they met in groups of eight or ten, always in a different location, to discuss the best way to mobilize the people against the dictatorship.

  With Luis and Iván, who turned out to be even better than he had hoped, Tony filled the poles with sticks of dynamite, and placed the caps after testing them with a remote control. To be certain of their timing, they practiced in the empty lot of the factory after the workers and clerical staff had left, to see how long they needed to take down a piece of existing fence and put up a new one, replacing the old posts with ones full of dynamite. Less than five hours. Everything was ready on June 12. They planned to act on June 15, when Trujillo returned from a trip to Cibao. They had at their disposal a dump truck that would knock down the piece of fence at dawn, so they would have a pretext—wearing the blue overalls of Municipal Services—to replace it with the armed one. They marked two points, each less than fifty paces from the explosion, where, with Imbert to the right and Luis and Iván to the left, they would activate the remote controls in quick succession, the first blast to kill Trujillo at the moment he passed in front of the poles, and the second to make sure he was dead.

  And then, on June 14, 1959, the eve of the day they had decided on, in the mountains of Constanza, it happened—the unexpected landing of an airplane from Cuba, painted with the colors and insignia of the Dominican Air Force and carrying anti-Trujillista guerrillas, followed a week later by landings on the beaches of Maimón and Estero Hondo. The arrival of that small detachment, which included the bearded Cuban comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa, sent a chill down the spine of the regime. It was a rash, uncoordinated attempt. The clandestine groups had absolutely no information regarding what was being prepared in Cuba. The support of Fidel Castro for the uprising against Trujillo had been, since the fall of Batista six months earlier, an obsessive topic at their meetings. They counted on that help in every plan they put together and then took apart, and for which they were amassing hunting rifles, revolvers, old shotguns. But no one Imbert knew was in touch with Cuba or had any idea that June 14 would see the arrival of dozens of revolutionaries; after putting the handful of guards at the Constanza airport out of commission, they fled to the nearby mountains, only to be hunted down like rabbits in the days that followed, and killed on the spot or taken to Ciudad Trujillo, where, on Ramfis’s orders, almost all of them were murdered (but not the Cuban Gómez Ochoa and his adopted son, Pedrito Mirabal, whom the regime, in another of its theatrical gestures, returned some time later to Fidel Castro).

  And no one could have suspected the magnitude of the repression the government would unleash after the landing. In the ensuing weeks and months, it intensified rather than subsided. The caliés seized all suspects and took them to the SIM, where they were subjected to torture—castration, bursting their eardrums, gouging out their eyes, sitting them on the Throne—to force them to name names. La Victoria, La Cuarenta, and El Nueve were overflowing with young people of both sexes—students, professionals, and office workers—many of them the children or relatives of men in the government. 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.

  Luis Gómez Pérez and Iván Tavares Castellanos fell into the hands of the caliés of the SIM on the morning of the day scheduled for the attack. With his customary realism, Antonio Imbert knew he had no possibility of seeking asylum: all the embassies were surrounded by lines of uniformed police, soldiers, and caliés. He calculated that, under torture, Luis, Iván, or anyone else from the clandestine groups would mention his name and the caliés would come for him. Then, just as he did tonight, he knew exactly what to do: welcome them with lead. He would try to send a few of them into the next world before he was cut to ribbons. He was not going to let them pull out his nails with pliers, cut out his tongue, or sit him in the electric chair. Kill him, yes; abuse him, never.

  On some pretext or other he sent his wife, Guarina, and his daughter, Leslie, who knew nothing of his activities, to the farm of some relatives in La Romana, and with a glass of rum in his hand, he sat down to wait. He had a loaded revolver, with the safety off, in his pocket. But the caliés did not come that day, or the next, or the one after that, to his house, or to his office at Ready-Mix, where he continued to show up punctually with all the sangfroid he could muster. Luis and Iván had not betrayed him, and neither had the people he knew in the clandestine groups. Miraculously, he escaped a repression that struck at the guilty and the innocent, filled the prisons, and for the first time in the twenty-nine years of the regime, terrorized the families of the middle class, Trujillo’s traditional mainstays and the source of most of the prisoners, members of what was called, in response to the frustrated invasion, the June 14 Movement. Tony’s cousin Ramón (Moncho) Imbert Rainieri was one of its leaders.

  Why did he escape? Because of the courage of Luis and Iván, no doubt—two years later they were still in the dungeons of La Victoria—and the courage, no doubt, of other girls and boys in June 14 who forgot to name him. Perhaps they considered him merely an onlooker, not an activist. Tony Imbert was so shy that he rarely opened his mouth at the meetings Moncho took him to for the first time; he would only listen, or offer a monosyllabic opinion. And it was unlikely he was in the files of the SIM except as the brother of Major Segundo Imbert. His service record was clean. He had spent his life working for the regime—as an inspector general on the railroad, governor of Puerto Plata, general supervisor of the National Lottery, director of the office that issued identity papers—and as manager at Ready-Mix, a factory that belonged to Trujillo’s son-in-law. Why would they suspect him?

  Very cautiously, in the days following June 14, he stayed at the factory at night, dismantled the sticks of dynamite and returned them to the quarries, while he pondered how and with whom he would carry out the next plan to do away with Trujillo. He confessed everything that had happened (and failed to happen) to his dearest friend, Salvador (Turk) Estrella Sadhalá, who berated Tony for not including him in the Máximo Gómez plot. Salvador had reached the same conclusion on his own: nothing would change as long as Trujillo was alive. They began to propose and discard possible methods of attack, but said nothing in front of Amadito, the third man in their trio: it was hard to believe that a military adjutant would want to kill the Benefactor.

  Not long afterward, the traumatic episode in Amadito’s career occurred—in order to obtain his promotion, he had to kill a prisoner (his ex-fiancée’s brother, he believed)—that brought him into the game. It would soon be two years since the landings at Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo. One year, eleven months, and fourteen days, to be exact. Antonio Imbert looked at his watch. He probably wasn’t coming.

  So many things had happened in the Dominican Republic, in the world, and in his personal life. So many. The massive dragnets of January 1960, into which so many boys and girls of the June 14 Movement fell, among them the Mirabal sisters and their husbands. Trujillo’s break with his old accomplice, the Catholic Church, after the Pastoral Letter of January 1960, in w
hich the bishops denounced the dictatorship. The attempt against President Betancourt of Venezuela, in June 1960, that mobilized so many countries against Trujillo, including his great ally the United States, which voted in favor of sanctions on August 6, 1960, at the conference in Costa Rica. And, on November 25, 1960—Imbert felt the inevitable piercing in his chest every time he recalled that dismal day—the murder of the three sisters, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal, and their driver, in La Cumbre, in the northern mountain range, on their way home from visiting Minerva’s and Maria Teresa’s husbands, imprisoned in the Fortress of Puerto Plata.

  The entire Dominican Republic learned about the killing in the rapid, mysterious way that news circulated from mouth to mouth and house to house and in a few hours reached the most remote corners of the country, though not a line appeared in the press, and often, as it circulated, the news transmitted by human tom-tom was colored, diminished, exaggerated until it turned into myth, legend, fiction, with almost no connection to real events. He recalled that night on the Malecón, not very far from where he was now, six months later, waiting for the Goat—to avenge the Mirabal sisters too. They were sitting on the stone railing, as they did every night—he, Salvador, Amadito, and, on this occasion, Antonio de la Maza—to enjoy the cool breeze and to talk, away from prying ears. What had happened to the Mirabal sisters set their teeth on edge, it turned their stomachs as they discussed the deaths of the three incredible women, high in the mountains, in an alleged car accident.

  “They kill our fathers, our brothers, our friends. And now they’re killing our women. And here we sit, resigned, waiting our turn,” he heard himself say.

  “Not resigned, Tony,” Antonio de la Maza objected. He had come from Restauración, and had brought the news of the death of the Mirabal sisters, which he had heard along the way. “Trujillo will pay. A plan’s in motion. But it has to be done right.”