The Feast of the Goat

As Urania feeds her father, she asks if the nurse remembers Trujillo. The nurse replies that she was very young when Trujillo was assassinated, but she knows Agustín was an important figure in Trujillo’s government. Urania replies that Agustín stayed important until he fell into disgrace. The nurse tries to be diplomatic by suggesting that “people seemed to live better back then […] and there wasn’t so much crime” (94), then excuses herself to take care of other business. Urania reflects that in the time that has passed, “horror had become myth” (95).

Urania tells her father there was crime: “Maybe there weren’t so many thieves breaking into houses […] But people were killed and beaten and tortured, people disappeared” (95). Urania thinks about how all the girls adored and longed for Ramfis Trujillo, the Chief’s son, who “had inherited none of [his father’s] virtues or defects, except, perhaps, his frenzied fornicating, his need to take women to bed to convince himself of his own virility” (95). Urania tells her father that despite her hatred for the Trujillos, she feels sorry for Ramfis, who had no options other than to become a monster.

She recalls the horror on her father’s face when, at the party thrown for the 25th anniversary of the Trujillo Era, which also celebrated Ramfis’s promotion to lieutenant general, Ramfis kissed her and paid her a compliment.