The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, was different. There she began to live again, to discover that life was worth living, that studying was not only therapy but a joy, the most glorious of diversions. How she had relished the classes, the lectures, the seminars! Overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities (in addition to studying law, she audited a course in Latin American history, a seminar on the Caribbean, a series on Dominican social history), she found there were not enough hours in the day or weeks in the month to do everything that appealed to her.

  Years of intensive work, and not only intellectual. In her second year at Harvard, her father let her know, in one of those letters she never answered, that in view of how badly things were going, he found himself obliged to cut the five hundred dollars a month he was sending her down to two hundred. She obtained a student loan, and her studies were assured. But to meet her frugal needs, in her free hours she worked as a cashier at a supermarket, a waitress at a Boston pizzeria, a clerk at a pharmacy, and—her least tedious job—as a companion and reader to a paraplegic millionaire of Polish origin, Mr. Melvin Makovsky, to whom, from five to eight in the evening, in his Victorian brownstone house on Massachusetts Avenue, she read voluminous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (War and Peace, Moby Dick, Bleak House, Pamela) and who, after she had been his reader for three months, unexpectedly proposed marriage.

  “A paraplegic?” Lucinda’s large eyes open wide.

  “Seventy years old,” Urania says. “And very rich. He proposed marriage, that’s right. So I could keep him company and read to him, that’s all.”

  “You were a fool, Urania.” Lucindita was scandalized. “You would have inherited a fortune, you’d be a millionaire.”

  “You’re right, it would have been a terrific deal.”

  “But you were young, idealistic, and you believed a girl should marry for love.” Her cousin makes her explanations easy. “As if any of that lasts. 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?”

  She liked studying so much, she felt so happy at Harvard, that she planned to complete a Ph.D. and go into teaching. But she didn’t have the money. Her father was in an increasingly difficult situation, in her third year he cut off her already reduced monthly allowance, and she needed to get a degree and begin earning money as soon as she could to pay off her student loans and support herself. The prestige of Harvard Law School was immense; when she began to send out applications, she was called to a good number of interviews. She decided on the World Bank. She was sorry to leave; during her years in Cambridge, she acquired her “perverse hobby”: reading and collecting books on the Trujillo Era.

  In the shabby living room there is another photograph of her graduation—a morning of brilliant sun that lit up the Yard, festive with canopies, elegant clothing, the many-colored mortarboards and robes of professors and graduates—identical to the one that Senator Cabral has in his bedroom. How did he get it? She certainly didn’t send it to him. Of course, Sister Mary. She’d sent this photograph to Santo Domingo Academy. For, until the nun’s death, Urania maintained a correspondence with her. That charitable soul must have kept Senator Cabral informed about Urania’s life. She remembers Sister Mary looking at the sea, leaning against the stone balustrade on the top floor of the academy building facing southeast—off-limits to students, it was where the nuns lived; at that distance, from the courtyard where the two German shepherds, Badulaque and Brutus, raced around the tennis courts, the volleyball courts, and the swimming pool, her lean silhouette seemed smaller.

  It’s hot, and she drips perspiration. She has never felt anything like this volcanic heat even in steamy New York summers, which are offset by the chill of air conditioning. This was a different kind of heat: the heat of her childhood. And she had never heard that extravagant symphony of blowing horns, voices, music, barking, squealing brakes, which came in through the windows and obliged her and her cousin to raise their voices.

  “Is it true that Johnny Abbes put Papa in prison when they killed Trujillo?”

  “Didn’t he tell you about it?” her cousin asks in surprise.

  “I was already in Michigan,” Urania reminds her.

  Lucinda nods, with an apologetic half-smile.

  “Of course he did. Those men went crazy. Ramfis, Radhamés, the Trujillistas. They began killing and locking up people left and right. Well, I really don’t remember much about it. I was a little girl and didn’t care anything about politics. Uncle Agustín had been distanced from Trujillo, and they must have thought he was involved in the plot. They held him in that awful prison, La Cuarenta, the one that Balaguer tore down, there’s a church there now. My mama went to talk to Balaguer, to plead with him. They kept him locked up for a few days until they proved he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Later, the President gave him a miserable little job that seemed like a joke: as an official in the Civil Government of the Third District.”

  “Did he say anything about how he was treated in La Cuarenta?”

  Lucinda exhales smoke that hides her face for a moment.

  “Maybe to my parents, but not to me or Manolita, we were very young. It hurt Uncle Agustín that they thought he could have betrayed Trujillo. For years he protested the injustice that had been done to him.”

  “The Generalissimo’s most loyal servant,” mocks Urania. “For a man capable of committing monstrous crimes for Trujillo to be suspected of complicity with his assassins—that really was an injustice!”

  She stops because of the reproach she sees on her cousin’s round face.

  “I don’t know why you talk about monstrous crimes,” she murmurs in astonishment. “Maybe my uncle was wrong to be a Trujillista. Now they say he was a dictator and all. Your father served him in good faith. Even though he held such high posts, he didn’t take advantage of them. Did he? He’s spending his final years as poor as a dog; without you, he’d be in an old-age home.”

  Lucinda tries to control the irritation that has overwhelmed her. She takes a final drag on her cigarette, and since she has no place to put it out—there are no ashtrays in the dilapidated living room—she tosses it out the window into the withered garden.

  “I know very well that my papa didn’t serve Trujillo out of self-interest.” Urania cannot avoid a trace of sarcasm. “That doesn’t seem extenuating to me. It’s more like an aggravating circumstance.”

  Her cousin looks at her, uncomprehending.

  “The fact that he did what he did out of admiration, out of love for him,” Urania explains. “Of course he must have been offended when Ramfis, Abbes García, and the rest suspected him. He almost went mad with despair when Trujillo turned his back on him.”

  “Well, maybe he was wrong,” her cousin repeats, her eyes begging her to change the subject. “At least recognize that he was a very decent man. He didn’t make accommodations, like so many others, who went on living the good life with every government, especially the three run by Balaguer.”

  “I wish he had served Trujillo out of self-interest, to steal or have power,” Urania says, and again she sees perplexity and displeasure in Lucinda’s eyes. “Anything, rather than seeing him whimper because Trujillo wouldn’t grant him an audience, because letters appeared in ‘The Public Forum’ insulting him.”

  It is a persistent memory, one that tormented her in Adrian and in Cambridge, in somewhat attenuated form stayed with her through all her years at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and that still assaults her in Manhattan: the helpless Senator Agustín Cabral pacing frantically in this very living room, asking himself what intrigue had been mounted against him by the Constitutional Sot, the unctuous Joaquín Balaguer, the cynical Virgilio Álvarez Pina, or Paíno Pichardo, to make the Generalissimo wipe out his existence overnight. Because what existence could a senator and ex-minister have when the Benefactor did not answer his letters o
r permit him to appear in Congress? Was the history of Anselmo Paulino repeating itself in him? Would the caliés come for him in the middle of the night and bury him in some dungeon? Would La Nación and El Caribe come out with vile reports of his thefts, embezzlements, betrayals, crimes?

  “Falling into disgrace was worse for him than if they had killed the person he loved best.”

  Her cousin listens to her with increasing discomfort.

  “Was that why you got so angry, Uranita?” she says at last. “Over politics? But I remember very clearly that you had no interest at all in politics. When those two girls nobody knew came in at midyear, for example. Everybody said they were caliesas and nobody talked about anything else, but you were bored by political gossip and told us all to shut up.”

  “I’ve never been interested in politics,” Urania agrees. “You’re right, why talk about things that happened thirty years ago?”

  The nurse appears on the stairs. She comes down drying her hands on a blue cloth.

  “All cleaned up and powdered like a baby,” she announces. “You can go up whenever you want. I’m going to prepare Don Agustín’s lunch. Can I fix something for you too, señora?”

  “No, thank you,” says Urania. “I’m going back to the hotel to shower and change.”

  “Well, tonight you’ll come to the house for supper. You’ll give my mama such a nice surprise. I’ll call Manolita too, she’ll be so happy.” Lucinda puts on a mournful face. “You’ll be shocked, Uranita. Do you remember how big and pretty the house was? Only half of it is left. When Papa died, we had to sell the garden along with the garage and the servants’ quarters. Well, enough of that. Seeing you has made me remember my childhood. We were happy then, weren’t we? It never occurred to us that everything would change, that lean years would come. Well, I’m going, Mama hasn’t had her lunch yet. You’ll come for supper, won’t you? You won’t disappear for another thirty-five years? You must remember the house, on Calle Santiago, about five blocks from here.”

  “I remember it very well.” Urania stands and embraces her cousin. “This neighborhood hasn’t changed at all.”

  She accompanies Lucinda to the front door and says goodbye with another hug and a kiss on the cheek. 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? Will you go to have supper with Lucinda, Manolita, and Aunt Adelina? The poor thing must be a fossil, just like your father.

  She climbs the stairs, slowly, putting off seeing him again. She is relieved to find him asleep, huddled in his chair; his eyes are wrinkled, his mouth open, and his rachitic chest rises and falls in a rhythmic pattern. “Just a piece of a man.” She sits on the bed and contemplates him. Studies him, reads him. They imprisoned him too, when Trujillo died. Believing he was one of the Trujillistas who conspired with Antonio de la Maza, General Juan Tomás Díaz and his brother Modesto, Antonio Imbert, and company. How frightening and how frightful for you, Papa. She had learned many years later, in a passing reference in an article about the events of 1961 in the Dominican Republic, that her father had also been caught in the dragnet. But she never knew the details. As far as she could remember, Senator Cabral did not allude to the experience in the letters she never answered. “That anyone could imagine, even for a second, that you planned to assassinate Trujillo, must have hurt you as much as falling into disgrace without knowing why.” Did Johnny Abbes himself interrogate him? Ramfis? Pechito León Estévez? Did they sit him on the Throne? Was her father linked in some way to the conspirators? True, he had made superhuman efforts to regain Trujillo’s favor, but what did that prove? Many conspirators kissed Trujillo’s ass until moments before they killed him. It very well might be that Agustín Cabral, a good friend of Modesto Díaz, had been informed of the plan. Even Balaguer knew about it, according to some. If the President of the Republic and the Minister of the Armed Forces had heard about it, why not her father? The conspirators knew that the Chief had ordered the fall from grace of Senator Cabral several weeks earlier; nothing strange about their thinking of him as a possible ally.

  From time to time her father emits a quiet snore. When a fly settles on his face, he drives it away, not waking, with a movement of his head. How did you find out they had killed him? On May 30, 1961, you were already in Adrian. She was beginning to shake off the heaviness, the exhaustion that kept her disengaged from the world and from herself, in a kind of somnambulism, when the sister in charge of the dormitory came to the room that Urania shared with four other girls and showed her the headline in the newspaper she held in her hand: TRUJILLO KILLED. “I’ll lend it to you,” she said. What did you feel? She would swear she felt nothing, that the news slid over her without piercing her consciousness, like everything else she heard and saw around her. It’s possible you didn’t even read the article, didn’t look past the headline. She recalls, however, that days or weeks later, in a letter from Sister Mary, there were details about the crime, about the caliés breaking into the academy to take away Bishop Reilly, about the lawlessness and uncertainty they were living through. But not even that letter from Sister Mary could pull her out of the profound indifference to everything and everyone Dominican into which she had fallen and from which she was freed only years later, by a course on Antillean history at Harvard.

  This sudden decision to come to Santo Domingo, to visit your father, does it mean you’re cured? No. You must have felt happy, been moved, at seeing Lucinda again, she was so close to you, your companion in rounds of vermouth, and at the matinees at the Olimpia and Elite movie theaters, on the beach or at the Country Club, and you must have felt sorry for the apparent mediocrity of her life, her lack of hope that it would improve. No. She didn’t make you happy, she didn’t move you, she didn’t make you feel sorry. She bored you because of that sentimentality and self-pity you find so objectionable.

  “You’re an iceberg. You really don’t seem Dominican. I’m more Dominican than you are.” Well, well; imagine remembering Steve Duncan, her colleague at the World Bank. 1985 or 1986? Around then. They had been in Taipei that night, having supper together in the Grand Hotel, shaped like a Hollywood pagoda, where they were staying; through its windows the city looked like a blanket of fireflies. For the third, fourth, or tenth time, Steve proposed marriage and Urania, more categorically than before, told him no. Then, in surprise, she saw Steve’s ruddy face contort. She couldn’t contain her laughter.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to cry, Steve. For love of me? Or have you had too much whiskey?”

  Steve did not smile. He sat looking at her for a long time, without answering, and then he said those words: “You’re an iceberg. You really don’t seem Dominican. I’m more Dominican than you are.” Well, well; the redhead fell in love with you, Urania. Whatever happened to him? A wonderful person, with a degree in economics from the University of Chicago, his interest in the Third World encompassed its problems of development, its languages, and its women. He finally married a Pakistani, an official of the Bank in the area of communications.

  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. A technique you handle with the mastery you’ve brought to every goal you set for yourself: studies, work, an independent life. “Everything except being happy.” Would she have been happy if, applying her will, her discipline, she had eventually overcome the unconquerable revulsion and disgust caused by men who desired her? 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.

  Her father’s eyes are open, and he looks at her with a certain fear.

  “I was thinking about Steve, a Canadian at the World Bank,” she says in a quiet voice, scrutinizing him. “Since I didn’t want to marry him, he told me I was an iceberg. An accusation that would offend any Dominican woman. We have a reputation for being ardent, unbeatable in love. I earned a reputation for being just the opposite: prudish, indifferent, frigid. What do you think of that, Papa? Just now, for my cousin Lucinda, I had to invent a lover so she wouldn’t think badly of me.”

  She falls silent because she notices that the invalid, shrinking in his chair, seems terrified. He no longer shakes off the flies that walk undisturbed across his face.

  “A subject I would have liked us to talk about, Papa. Women, sex. Did you have affairs after Mama died? I never noticed anything. You didn’t seem like a womanizer. Did power satisfy you so much you didn’t need sex? It happens, even in this hot country. It happened to our perpetual President, Don Joaquín Balaguer, didn’t it? A bachelor at the age of ninety. He wrote love poems, and there are rumors he had a daughter he never recognized. I always had the impression that sex never interested him, that power gave him what other men got in bed. Was that the case with you, Papa? Or did you have discreet adventures? Did Trujillo invite you to his orgies at Mahogany House? What happened there? Did the Chief, like Ramfis, amuse himself by humiliating his friends and courtiers, forcing them to shave their legs, shave their bodies, make themselves up like old queens? Did he do those charming things too? Did he do them to you?”

  Senator Cabral has turned so pale that Urania thinks: “He’s going to faint.” To let him recover, she moves away. She goes to the window and looks out. She feels the strength of the sun on her head, on the feverish skin of her face. She is sweating. You ought to go back to the hotel, fill the tub with bubbles, take a long, cool bath. Or go down and dive into the tiled pool and then try the Dominican buffet at the restaurant in the Hotel Jaragua, they’ll have beans with rice and pork. But you don’t feel like doing that. You’d rather go to the airport, take the first plane to New York, and resume your life at the busy law firm, and in your apartment at 73rd and Madison.