The Feast of the Goat

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Have you seen Egghead?”

  “No, Excellency. I followed your instructions not to receive him or answer his calls. He wrote me several letters, which you have already seen. Through Aníbal, his brother-in-law, who is at the Tobacco Company, I know he is very distressed. ‘On the verge of suicide,’ he told me.”

  Had it been frivolous to put an efficient servant like Cabral to the test at this difficult time for the regime? Perhaps.

  “We’ve wasted enough time on Agustín Cabral,” he said. “The Church, the United States. Let’s start there. What’s going to happen with Bishop Reilly? How long is he going to stay with the nuns at Santo Domingo and play the martyr?”

  “I have spoken at length with the archbishop and the nuncio in this regard. I insisted that Monsignor Reilly must leave Santo Domingo Academy, that his presence there is intolerable. I believe I have convinced them. They ask that the bishop’s safety be guaranteed, that the campaign in La Nación, El Caribe, and the Dominican Voice come to an end. And that he be allowed to return to his diocese in San Juan de la Maguana.”

  “Don’t they also want you to grant him the Presidency of the Republic?” the Benefactor asked. The mere mention of the name Reilly or Panal made his blood boil. What if the head of the SIM was right after all? Suppose they definitively lanced that focal point of infection? “Abbes García suggests I put Reilly and Panal on a plane back to their countries. Expel them as undesirables. What Fidel Castro is doing in Cuba with the Spanish priests and nuns.”

  The President did not say a word or make the smallest gesture. He waited, absolutely still.

  “Or allow the people to punish that pair of traitors,” he continued, after a pause. “They’re longing to do it. I’ve seen that on the tours I’ve made recently. In San Juan de la Maguana, in La Vega, they can barely control themselves.”

  Dr. Balaguer acknowledged that the people, if they could, would lynch them. They were resentful of these purple-clad priests and their ingratitude toward someone who had done more for the Catholic Church than all the governments of the Republic since 1844. But the Generalissimo was too wise and too much of a realist to follow the rash, impolitic advice of the head of the SIM, which, if carried out, would have the most unfortunate consequences for the nation. He spoke without haste, in a cadence that, combined with his pure elocution, was extremely soothing.

  “You’re the person in the regime who despises Abbes García most,” he interrupted. “Why?”

  Dr. Balaguer had his answer ready on his lips.

  “The colonel is a technician in questions of security, and he provides a good service to the State,” he replied. “But, in general, his political judgments are reckless. Because of the respect and admiration I feel for Your Excellency, I permit myself to entreat you to reject those ideas. The expulsion or, even worse, the death of Reilly and Panal would bring another military invasion. And the end of the Trujillo Era.”

  Because his tone was so gentle and cordial, and the music of his words so agreeable, it seemed as if the things Dr. Joaquín Balaguer said did not possess the firm opinions, the rigor, that the tiny man on occasion—this was one of those times—permitted himself with the Chief. Was he going too far? Had he succumbed, like Egghead, to the idiocy of believing himself safe, and did he also need a dose of reality? A curious character, Joaquín Balaguer. He had been at his side since 1930, when Trujillo sent two guards for him at the small Santo Domingo hotel where he was living, and took him to his house for a month so that he could help him in the election campaign; he had as an ephemeral ally Estrella Ureña, the leader from Cibao, and the young Balaguer was his ardent partisan. The invitation and a half hour’s conversation were enough for the twenty-four-year-old poet, professor, and lawyer, a native of the shabby little village of Navarrete, to be transformed into an unconditional Trujillista, a competent, discreet servant in all the diplomatic, administrative, and political posts he had conferred on him. In spite of their thirty years together, the truth was that this person, so unobtrusive that Trujillo once baptized him the Shadow, was still something of a mystery to him, though the Chief boasted of having a bloodhound’s nose for men’s characters. He did, however, harbor the certainty that Balaguer lacked ambitions. Unlike the other men in his intimate group, whose appetites he could read like an open book in their behavior, their initiatives, and their flattery, Joaquín Balaguer always gave the impression of aspiring only to what he wished to give him. In his diplomatic posts in Spain, France, Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico, or in the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs, or in the Presidency, he seemed completely fulfilled, even overwhelmed by missions far beyond his dreams and aptitudes, and which, for that very reason, he strove resolutely to carry out. But—it suddenly occurred to the Benefactor—because of his humility the tiny bard and legal scholar had always been at the top, yet, unlike the others, and thanks to his inconsequentiality, he had never endured periods of disgrace. Which was why he was puppet president. In 1957, when a Vice President had to be chosen from the list headed by his brother Blacky Trujillo, the Dominican Party followed his orders and selected Rafael Bonnelly, the ambassador to Spain. The Generalissimo decided suddenly to replace that aristocrat with the insignificant Balaguer, using a decisive argument: “He has no ambitions.” But now this intellectual lacking in ambition, with his delicate manner and refined speech, held the highest office in the nation and allowed himself to rail against the head of the Intelligence Service. He would have to take him down a peg or two someday.

  Balaguer remained motionless and mute, not daring to interrupt the Benefactor’s reflections, hoping he would deign to speak to him. He did, finally, without returning to the subject of the Church:

  “I’ve always used formal address with you, haven’t I? The only one of my collaborators I call usted. Haven’t you noticed?”

  The round little face blushed.

  “I have, Excellency,” he murmured, shamefaced. “I always ask myself if you avoid tú because you have less confidence in me than in my colleagues.”

  “I only realized it now,” Trujillo added in surprise. “And you never call me Chief, like the others. All the years we’ve been together, and you’re still something of a mystery to me. I never could discover any human weakness in you, Dr. Balaguer.”

  “I am full of them, Excellency,” the President said with a smile. “But instead of paying me a compliment, you seem to be reproaching me.”

  The Generalissimo was not joking. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, not moving his piercing gaze away from Balaguer. He passed his hand over his brush mustache and parched lips, and scrutinized him steadily.

  “There’s something inhuman in you,” he said, as if the object of his remarks were not present. “You don’t have a man’s natural appetites. As far as I know, you don’t like women and you don’t like boys. Your life is more chaste than the nuncio’s, your neighbor on Avenida Máximo Gómez. Abbes García couldn’t find any mistress or girlfriend, and no whores either. Which means that sex doesn’t interest you. Or money. You hardly have any savings; except for the house where you live, you don’t own property, or stocks, and you have no investments, at least not here. You haven’t been involved in the intrigues, the deadly wars that bleed my collaborators dry, though they all plot against you. I had to force ministries and embassies on you, the Vice Presidency, even the Presidency. If I removed you now and sent you off to some damn little post in Montecristi or Azua, you’d go and be just as content. You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t eat, you don’t chase women, money, or power. Is that the way you really are? Or is it a strategy with a hidden agenda?”

  Dr. Balaguer’s clean-shaven face flushed again. His soft voice did not falter when he declared:

  “Ever since I first met Your Excellency, on that April morning in 1930, my only vice has been serving you. That was when I learned that by serving Trujillo I was serving my country. This has enriched my life more than a woman, or money, or power could have done. I will
never find the words to thank Your Excellency for allowing me to work at your side.”

  Bah, the usual flattery, the kind any Trujillista who was less well-read might have said. For a moment, he had imagined that the diminutive, inoffensive man would open his heart, as in the confessional, and reveal his sins and fears, his animosities and dreams. He probably didn’t have a secret life, or any existence other than the one everybody could see: he was a functionary, frugal, hardworking, tenacious, and unimaginative, who gave shape, in beautiful orations, proclamations, letters, agreements, speeches, and diplomatic negotiations, to the ideas of the Generalissimo; a poet who produced acrostics and odes to the beauty of Dominican women and the Dominican landscape that embellished poetic festivals, special anniversaries, Miss Dominican Republic pageants, and patriotic celebrations. A little man without his own light, like the moon, who was illuminated by Trujillo, the sun.

  “I know you have been a good colleague,” the Benefactor declared. “Yes, ever since that morning in 1930. I sent for you at the suggestion of Bienvenida, my wife at the time. A relative of yours, wasn’t she?”

  “My cousin, Excellency. That lunch decided my life. You invited me to accompany you on your election campaign. You did me the honor of asking me to introduce you at meetings in San Pedro de Macorís, the capital, and La Romana. It was my debut as a political speaker. At that moment, my destiny took another direction. My vocation had been literature, the classroom, the lecture hall. Thanks to you, politics came to the forefront.”

  A secretary knocked at the door, asking permission to enter. Balaguer consulted the Generalissimo with a glance, and gave his authorization. The secretary—well-cut suit, small mustache, hair smoothed with brillantine—brought in a memorandum signed by five hundred seventy-six prominent residents of San Juan de la Maguana, requesting “that the return to this prelature of Monsignor Reilly, the felonious bishop, be prevented.” A commission led by the mayor and the local head of the Dominican Party wanted to deliver it personally to the President. Would he receive them? Again he consulted the Benefactor, who nodded.

  “Ask them to be good enough to wait,” Balaguer said. “I shall receive those gentlemen as soon as I finish my meeting with His Excellency.”

  Could Balaguer be as devout a Catholic as people said? Countless jokes circulated about his bachelorhood and the pious, intense manner he adopted at Masses, Te Deums, and processions; he had seen him come up to take communion with his hands together and his eyes lowered. When he built the house where he lived with his sisters, on Máximo Gómez, next to the nuncio’s residence, Trujillo had the Walking Turd write a letter to “The Public Forum” that ridiculed their proximity and asked what kind of relationship existed between the diminutive lawyer and the envoy of His Holiness. Because of his reputation for piety and his excellent relations with the priests, he entrusted him with designing the regime’s policy toward the Catholic Church. He did it very well; until Sunday, January 24, 1960, when the Pastoral Letter from those bastards was read in every parish, the Church had been a solid ally. The Concordat between the Dominican Republic and the Vatican, which Balaguer negotiated and Trujillo signed in Rome, in 1954, provided formidable support for his regime and his own presence in the Catholic world. The poet and legal scholar must have suffered because of this year-and-a-half-long confrontation between the government and the crows. Could he really be so devout? He always maintained that the regime had to get along with the bishops, the priests, the Vatican, for pragmatic, political reasons, not religious ones: the approbation of the Catholic Church legitimized the actions of the regime to the Dominican people. What had happened to Perón must not happen to Trujillo: Perón’s government began to crumble when the Church turned against him. Was he right? Would the hostility of those eunuchs in cassocks be the end of Trujillo? Before he let that happen, Panal and Reilly would be fattening the sharks at the bottom of the cliffs.

  “I’m going to say something that will please you, Mr. President,” he said abruptly. “I don’t have time to read the bullshit intellectuals write. All those poems and novels. Matters of state are too demanding. Even though he’s worked so many years with me, I’ve never read anything by Marrero Aristy. I didn’t read Over, or the articles he wrote about me, or his Dominican History. And I haven’t read the hundreds of books dedicated to me by poets, playwrights, and novelists. I haven’t even read the stuff my wife writes. I don’t have time for that, or for seeing movies, or listening to music, or going to the ballet or to cockfights. And I’ve never trusted artists. They’re spineless and have no sense of honor, they tend to be traitors and are very servile. I haven’t read your verses or essays either. I barely opened your book on Duarte, The Christ of Liberty, that you sent to me with such an affectionate dedication. But there’s one exception. A speech you gave seven years ago. At the Fine Arts, when you were inducted into the Academy of the Language. Do you remember it?”

  The little man had turned even brighter red. He radiated an exalted light of indescribable joy:

  “ ‘God and Trujillo: A Realistic Interpretation,’” he murmured, lowering his lids.

  “I’ve read it many times,” said the high-pitched, mellifluous voice of the Benefactor. “I know whole paragraphs by heart, like poems.”

  Why this revelation to the puppet president? It was a weakness, and he never gave in to them. Balaguer could boast about it, feel important. Things weren’t going so well that he could afford to to lose another collaborator in so short a time. It reassured him to recall that perhaps the greatest attribute of this puny little man was that not only did he know what was advisable but, even more important, he ignored what was inadvisable. He would not repeat this, in order not to earn the homicidal enmity of the other courtiers. Balaguer’s speech had moved him deeply and often led him to wonder if it might not express a profound truth, one of those unfathomable divine decisions that mark the destiny of a people. That night, the Benefactor had paid little attention to the opening paragraphs of the address read by the new academician, dressed in a cutaway coat worn with little flair, from the stage of the Theater of Fine Arts. (He wore tails too, as did all the men in the audience; the ladies, glittering with jewels and diamonds, were in long dresses.) It seemed like a summary of Dominican history starting with the landing of Christopher Columbus on Hispaniola. But he began to be interested when, in the educated words and elegant prose of the speaker, a vision, a thesis, started to emerge. The Dominican Republic had survived more than four centuries—four hundred thirty-eight years—of countless adversities, including buccaneers, Haitian invasions, attempts at annexation, the massacre and flight of whites (only sixty thousand remained when it declared its emancipation from Haiti), because of Divine Providence. Until now, the task had been assumed directly by the Creator. But in 1930, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina had relieved God of this arduous mission.

  “ ‘A bold, energetic will that supports, in the march of the Republic toward the fulfillment of its destiny, the protective benevolence of supernatural forces,’” Trujillo recited with half-closed eyes. “ ‘God and Trujillo: here, in synthesis, is the explanation, first, of the survival of the nation, and second, of the present-day flourishing of Dominican life.’”

  He opened his eyes and gave a melancholy sigh. Balaguer, made even smaller by gratitude, listened in rapture.

  “Do you still believe that God passed the baton to me? That He delegated to me the responsibility of saving this country?” he asked with an indefinable mixture of irony and interest.

  “More than I did then, Excellency,” replied the delicate, clear voice. “Trujillo could not have carried out his superhuman mission without transcendental help. You have been, for this nation, an instrument of the Supreme Being.”

  “Too bad those asshole bishops haven’t heard the news,” Trujillo said with a smile. “If your theory is true, I hope God makes them pay for their blindness.”

  Balaguer was not the first to associate divinity with his work. The Benefactor recalled
that the law professor, attorney, and politician Don Jacinto B. Peynado (whom he had made puppet president in 1938, when the massacre of Haitians had resulted in international protests against his third reelection) had placed a large luminous sign on the door of his house: “God and Trujillo.” And then identical signs began to be displayed on many homes in the capital city and in the interior. No, it hadn’t been the words but the arguments justifying that association that had struck Trujillo as an overwhelming truth. It wasn’t easy to feel the weight of a supernatural hand on his shoulders. Reissued every year by the Trujillonian Institute, Balaguer’s speech was required reading in schools, and the central text in the Civics Handbook, used to educate high school and university students in the Trujillista Doctrine and composed by a trio of men he had selected: Balaguer, Egghead Cabral, and the Walking Turd.

  “I’ve often thought about that theory of yours, Dr. Balaguer,” he confessed. “Was it a divine decision? Why me? Why was I chosen?”

  Dr. Balaguer wet his lips with the tip of his tongue before answering:

  “The decisions of the Divinity are ineluctable,” he said unctuously. “What must have been taken into account were your exceptional talent for leadership, your capacity for work, and, above all, your love for this country.”

  Why was he wasting time on this bullshit? He had urgent matters to attend to. And yet, it was very strange, he felt a need to prolong this vague, reflective, personal conversation. Why with Balaguer? Within the circle of his collaborators, he had shared the fewest intimate moments with him. He never invited him to the private suppers in San Cristóbal, at Mahogany House, where the liquor flowed and excesses were sometimes committed. Perhaps because, in that entire horde of intellectuals and writers, he was the only one who had not yet disappointed him. And because he was famous for his intelligence (although, according to Abbes García, a dirty aura surrounded the President).