The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Thanks for calling me.” Senator Cabral said goodbye. “My love to Adelina and the girls. I’ll stop by to see them.”

  Thirty years in the highest echelons of political power had made Agustín Cabral a man familiar with imponderables—traps, ambushes, trickery, betrayals—and so, learning there was a letter attacking him in “The Public Forum,” the most widely read, and widely feared, section in El Caribe because it was fed from the National Palace and served as a political barometer for the entire country, did not unnerve him. It was the first time he had appeared in the infernal column; other ministers, senators, governors, or officials had been burned in its flames, but not him, until now. He went back to the dining room. His daughter, in her school uniform, was eating breakfast: mangú—plantain mashed with butter—and fried cheese. He kissed the top of her head (“Hi, Papa”), sat down across from her, and while the maid poured his coffee, he slowly, carefully opened the folded paper lying on a corner of the table. He turned the pages until he reached “The Public Forum”:

  To the Editor:

  I am writing out of civic duty to protest the affront to Dominican citizens and to the unrestricted freedom of expression which the government of Generalissimo Trujillo guarantees to this Republic. I refer to the fact that until now, your respected and widely read pages have not disclosed something that everyone knows, which is that Senator Agustín Cabral, nicknamed Egghead (for what reason?) was stripped of the Presidency of the Senate when it was determined that he was guilty of irregularities as the Minister of Public Works, a post he occupied until a short while ago. It is also known that because this regime is scrupulous in questions of probity and the use of public funds, an investigative committee to look into apparent mismanagement and collusion—illegal commissions, acquisition of obsolete materials at elevated prices, misleading inflation of budgets, in which the senator would have been involved in the course of his duties as minister—has been named to examine the charges against him.

  Doesn’t the Trujillista citizenry have the right to be informed with regard to such serious matters?

  Respectfully,

  Telésforo Hidalgo Saíno, Engineer

  Calle Duarte no. 171

  Ciudad Trujillo

  “I have to run, Papa,” Senator Cabral heard, and without a single gesture that would belie his apparent calm, he moved the newspaper aside to kiss the girl. “I won’t be on the school bus, I’m staying to play volleyball. Some friends and I will walk home.”

  “Be careful at the intersections, Uranita.”

  He drank his orange juice and had an unhurried cup of steaming, freshly brewed coffee, but did not taste the mangú or fried cheese or toast with honey. 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.

  The cook asked if he’d be home for lunch. No, only for supper, and he nodded when Aleli suggested the menu. When he heard the official car of the Senate Presidency pulling up to the door of his house, he looked at his watch: exactly eight o’clock. Thanks to Trujillo, he had discovered that time is gold. Like so many others, since his youth he had made the Chief’s obsessions his own: order, exactitude, discipline, perfection. Senator Agustín Cabral had said it in a speech: “Thanks to His Excellency, the Benefactor, we Dominicans have discovered the wonders of punctuality.” Putting on his jacket, he went out to the street: “If I had been dismissed, the official car would not have come for me.” His assistant, Humberto Arenal, an Air Force lieutenant who had never hidden his connections to the SIM, opened the door for him. His official car, with Teodosio at the wheel. His assistant. There was nothing to worry about.

  “He never found out why he fell into disgrace?” Urania asks in astonishment.

  “Never with any certainty,” Aunt Adelina explains. “There were plenty of suppositions, but that’s all. For years Agustín asked himself what he had done to make Trujillo so angry overnight. And turn a man who had served him his whole life into a pariah.”

  Urania observes Marianita’s disbelief as she listens to them.

  “They sound like things that happened on another planet, don’t they, Marianita?”

  The girl blushes.

  “It’s just that it seems so incredible, Aunt Urania. Like something in The Trial, the Orson Welles movie they showed at the Cinema Club. Anthony Perkins is tried and executed, and he never finds out why.”

  Manolita has been fanning herself with both hands, but she stops in order to interject:

  “They said he fell into disgrace because somebody made Trujillo believe it was Uncle Agustín’s fault that the bishops refused to proclaim him Benefactor of the Catholic Church.”

  “They said a thousand things,” exclaims Aunt Adelina. “The doubt was the worst part of his calvary. The family was being ruined and nobody knew what Agustín had been accused of, what he had done or failed to do.”

  No other senator was there when Agustín Cabral entered the Senate at a quarter past eight, as he did every morning. The guards gave him the proper salute, and the ushers and clerks he passed in the halls on the way to his office said good morning with their usual effusiveness. But the uneasiness felt by his two secretaries, Isabelita and Paris Goico, a young lawyer, was reflected in their faces.

  “Who died?” he joked. “Are you worried about the letter in ‘The Public Forum’? We’ll clear up that nasty business right now. Call the editor of El Caribe, Isabelita. At home—Panchito doesn’t go to his office before noon.”

  He sat down at his desk, glanced at the pile of documents, his correspondence, the day’s schedule prepared by the efficient Parisito. “The letter was dictated by the Chief,” he thought. A little snake slid down his spine. Was it one of those melodramas that amused the Generalissimo? In the midst of tensions with the Church and a confrontation with the United States and the OAS, was he in the mood for one of his bravura performances from the past, when he had felt all-powerful, unthreatened? Was this the time for circuses?

  “He’s on the line, Don Agustín.”

  He picked up the receiver and waited a few seconds before speaking.

  “Did I wake you, Panchito?”

  “What an idea, Egghead.” The journalist’s voice sounded normal. “I’m up at the crack of dawn, like a capon rooster. And I sleep with one eye open, just in case. What’s up?”

  “Well, as you can imagine, I’m calling about the letter this morning in ‘The Public Forum,’” Senator Cabral said hoarsely. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

  The answer came in the same light, jocular tone, as if they were talking about something trivial.

  “It came recommended, Egghead. I wasn’t going to print something like that without checking. Believe me, given our friendship, it didn’t make me happy to publish it.”

  “Yes, yes, sure,” he murmured to himself. He mustn’t lose his composure for a single instant.

  “I intend to rectify the slander,” he said softly. “I haven’t been dismissed from anything. I’m calling you from the office of the President of the Senate. And that alleged committee investigating my management of the Ministry of Public Works, that’s another lie.”

  “Send me your rectification right away,” Panchito replied. “I’ll do everything I can to publish it, it’s the least I can do. You k
now the esteem I have for you. I’ll be at the paper from four o’clock on. My love to Uranita. Take care of yourself, Agustín.”

  As soon as he hung up, he began to have his doubts. Had he done the right thing in calling the editor of El Caribe? Wasn’t it a false move that betrayed his concern? What else could Panchito have said? He received letters for “The Public Forum” directly from the National Palace and printed them, no questions asked. He looked at his watch: a quarter to nine. He had time; the meeting of the Senate executive committee was at nine-thirty. He dictated his rectification to Isabelita with the same austere clarity he used in all his writing. A brief, dry, fulminating letter: he continued as President of the Senate and no one had questioned his scrupulous management at the Ministry of Public Works, entrusted to him by the regime presided over by that eponymous Dominican, His Excellency Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Benefactor and Father of the New Nation.

  When Isabelita left to type the letter, Paris Goico came into the office.

  “The meeting of the Senate executive committee has been canceled, Don Agustín.”

  He was young and didn’t know how to dissemble; his mouth hung open and his face was livid.

  “Without consulting me? By whom?”

  “The Vice President of the Senate, Don Agustín. He just told me so himself.”

  He weighed what he had just heard. Could it be a separate incident, unrelated to the letter in “The Public Forum”? Parisito waited in distress, standing beside the desk.

  “Is Dr. Quintanilla in his office?” His secretary nodded, and he rose to his feet. “Tell him I’m on my way to see him.”

  “It can’t be that you don’t remember, Uranita,” her Aunt Adelina admonished her. “You were fourteen years old. It was the most serious thing that had happened in the family, even worse than the accident that killed your mother. And you didn’t know anything about it?”

  They’d had coffee and tea. Urania tried a mouthful of arepa. They sat around the dining-room table, talking in the wan light of a small floor lamp. The Haitian servant, as silent as a cat, had cleared the table.

  “I remember how Papa suffered, of course I do, Aunt Adelina,” Urania explains. “I forget the details, the daily incidents. He tried to hide it from me at first. ‘There are some problems, Uranita, they’ll be resolved soon.’ I didn’t imagine that from then on my life would turn upside down.”

  She feels the eyes of her aunt, her cousins, her niece, burning into her. Lucinda says what they are all thinking:

  “Some good came out of it for you, Uranita. You wouldn’t be where you are now if it hadn’t. But for us, it was a disaster.”

  “And most of all, for my poor brother,” her aunt says accusingly. “They stabbed him in the back and left him to bleed for another thirty years.”

  A parrot shrieks above Urania’s head, startling her. She hadn’t realized it was there until now; the bird is agitated, moving from side to side on its wooden bar inside a large cage with heavy blue bars. Her aunt, cousins, and niece burst into laughter.

  “This is Samson.” Manolita introduces him. “He’s upset because we woke him. He’s a sleepyhead.”

  The parrot helps to ease the atmosphere.

  “I’m sure if I understood what he was saying, I’d learn a lot of secrets,” Urania jokes, pointing at Samson.

  Senator Agustín Cabral is in no mood for smiling. He responds with a solemn nod to the honeyed greeting of Dr. Jeremías Quintanilla, Vice President of the Senate; he has just burst into his office, and with no preliminaries, he rebukes him:

  “Why have you canceled the meeting of the Senate executive committee? Isn’t that the responsibility of the President? I demand an explanation.”

  The heavy, cocoa-colored face of Senator Quintanilla nods repeatedly, while his lips, in a cadenced, almost musical Spanish, attempt to placate him:

  “Of course, Egghead. Don’t be angry. Everything except death has a reason.”

  A plump man in his sixties, with puffy eyelids and a wet mouth, he is wearing a blue suit and a glistening tie with silver stripes. He smiles persistently, and Agustín Cabral sees him remove his glasses, wink at him, roll his eyes, revealing the gleaming whites, then step toward him, take his arm, and pull him as he says, very loudly:

  “Let’s sit here, we’ll be more comfortable.”

  He doesn’t lead him to the heavy, tiger-foot chairs in his office but to a balcony with half-opened doors. He obliges him to go out with him so they can talk in the open air, across from the droning hum of the ocean, away from indiscreet ears. The sun is strong; the brilliant morning is ablaze with engines and horns from the Malecón, and the voices of street peddlers.

  “What the hell’s going on, Monkey?” Cabral whispers.

  Quintanilla is still holding his arm and is now very serious. In his eyes he can detect a vague feeling of solidarity or compassion.

  “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’?” Monkey Quintanilla murmurs in his ear. “Didn’t you read El Caribe this morning? That’s what’s going on.”

  For the first time since reading the letter in “The Public Forum,” Agustín Cabral is afraid. It’s true: yesterday or the day before somebody at the Country Club joked that the society page in La Nación had deprived him of “distinguished gentleman,” which was usually a bad omen: those kinds of warnings amused the Generalissimo. This was serious. A storm. He had to use all his experience and intelligence not to drown in it.

  “Did the order to cancel the meeting of the executive committee come from the Palace?” he whispers. The Vice President, leaning over, has his ear against Cabral’s mouth.

  “Where else would it come from? There’s more. All committees in which you participate are canceled. The directive says: ‘Until the status of the President of the Senate is regularized.’”

  He is silent. It has happened. The nightmare is happening, the one that came periodically to drag down his triumphs, his ascent, his political achievements: he has been estranged from the Chief.

  “Who sent it to you, Monkey?”

  Quintanilla’s chubby face tightens in alarm, and Cabral finally understands Monkey’s agitation. Is the Vice President going to say he cannot commit an act of such disloyalty? Abruptly, he makes his decision:

  “Henry Chirinos.” He takes his arm again. “I’m sorry, Egghead. I don’t think there’s much I can do, but if I can, you can count on me.”

  “Did Chirinos tell you what I’m accused of?”

  “He only gave me the order and made a speech: ‘I know nothing. I am the humble messenger of a higher decision.’”

  “Your papa always suspected that the schemer was Chirinos, the Constitutional Sot,” Aunt Adelina recalls.

  “That fat repulsive nigger was one of the people who made the best accommodation,” Lucindita interrupts. “From Trujillo’s bed and board to Balaguer’s minister and ambassador. Do you see what kind of country this is, Uranita?”

  “I remember him very well, I saw him in Washington a few years ago, when he was ambassador,” says Urania. “He often came to the house when I was little. He seemed like one of Papa’s intimate friends.”

  “And Aníbal’s, and mine,” adds Aunt Adelina. “He would come here with all his flattery, he’d recite his poems for us. He was always quoting books, pretending to be educated. He invited us to the Country Club once. I didn’t want to believe he had betrayed his lifelong friend. Well, that’s what politics is, you make your way over corpses.”

  “Uncle Agustín had too much integrity, he was too good, that’s why they turned on him.”

  Lucindita waits for her to corroborate this, to protest the injustice done to him. But Urania does not have the strength to pretend. She merely listens, with an air of regret.

  “But my husband, may he rest in peace, behaved like a gentleman, he gave you
r papa all his support.” Aunt Adelina gives a sarcastic little laugh. “What a Quixote he was! He lost his job at the Tobacco Company and never found work again.”

  Samson the parrot lets loose another flood of shouts and noises that sound like curses. “Quiet, lazybones,” Lucindita scolds him.

  “Just as well we haven’t lost our sense of humor, girls,” exclaims Manolita.

  “Find Senator Henry Chirinos and tell him I want to see him right away, Isabel,” Senator Cabral says as he enters his office. And addressing Paris Goico: “Apparently he’s the one who cooked up this mess.”

  He sits down at his desk, prepares to review again the day’s schedule, but becomes aware of his circumstances. Does it make sense to sign letters, resolutions, memoranda, notes, as the President of the Senate of the Republic? It’s doubtful he still is. The worst thing would be to show signs of discouragement to his subordinates. Put the best face on a bad situation. He picks up the papers and is beginning to reread the first page when he notices that Parisito is still there. His hands are trembling:

  “President Cabral, I wanted to tell you,” he stammers, devastated by emotion. “Whatever happens, I’m with you. In everything. I know how much I owe you, Dr. Cabral.”

  “Thank you, Goico. You’re new to this world, and you’ll see things that are worse. Don’t worry. We’ll weather the storm. And now, let’s get to work.”

  “Senator Chirinos is expecting you at his house, Senator Cabral.” Isabelita is speaking as she comes into the office. “He answered himself. Do you know what he said? ‘The doors of my house are open day and night to my great friend Senator Cabral.’”

  When he leaves the Congress building, the guards salute him as usual. The black, funereal car is still there. But his assistant, Lieutenant Humberto Arenal, has disappeared. Teodosio, the driver, opens the door for him.

  “Senator Henry Chirinos’s house.”

  The chauffeur nods, not saying a word. Later, when they are driving along Avenida Mella, on the edge of the colonial city, he looks at him in the rearview mirror and says: