The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat, written by Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, is a work of historical fiction originally published in Spanish in 2000 and translated into English by Edith Grossman in 2001. The novel chronicles the final days of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship over the Dominican Republic from three points of view: through the eyes of his assassins in 1961, from the time they wait to ambush him until their final moments; through Trujillo’s own eyes, from the morning of his last day until his assassination that evening; and in the 1990s, through the eyes of fictional character Urania Cabral, who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time since leaving just before Trujillo’s assassination. Vargas Llosa fictionalizes the lives and experiences of real people while simultaneously basing fictional characters’ experiences on actual or commonly reported events.

Plot Summary

Urania Cabral returns to the Dominican Republic in 1996 after her father, a former official in the Trujillo government, falls ill. She broke off contact with her Dominican relatives when she left for a Catholic school in the United States, at age 14, in 1961. She graduated from Harvard Law and currently works as a lawyer for the World Bank, spending her time exercising, working, and reading about the Trujillo Era. When she makes her way to her father, now a nonresponsive and bedridden invalid, she talks at him about the horrors of the regime as she has come to understand them, wondering aloud how much he knew and how complicit he was in those horrors. Her aunt and cousins also assemble at the house and chastise her for breaking ties with her family.

Alternating chapters tell the story of 70-year-old Rafael Trujillo (also known as El Chivo, The Goat) and the day of his assassination in 1961. A man beholden to routine, he begins his final day of life at four in the morning, with half an hour of vigorous exercise, followed by bathing, shaving, and dressing while listening to various state-sponsored newscasts. Trujillo’s primary political concerns are the economic sanctions placed on the Dominican Republic and the growing tensions between his government and the Catholic Church. More personally, he is experiencing a crisis of manhood: incontinence accompanied by impotence. He received a diagnosis of prostate cancer and rejected it, refusing to challenge his virile self-image. He decides to take a woman to his Mahogany House that evening (this, too, is part of his rigid routine), although this time he decides to go a day early and is delayed when the woman does not accompany him. The route to Mahogany House is not secured, and his assassins, able to predict his routine almost down to the minute, lie in wait along the road.

The conspiracy to assassinate Trujillo is primarily planned and carried out by just seven people who have a range of motives for staging a coup. When Trujillo finally appears, the first car runs him down and kills him in a hail of gunfire, with the second two cars following shortly after. General Román, who promised to initiate a military takeover after Trujillo’s death, fails to deliver, and the assassins are systematically hunted down and, with the exception of two, imprisoned and killed. President Balaguer, who consolidates power in the aftermath, hails the remaining assassins as heroes and attempts to steer the ship of state away from Trujillism and toward democratic reform.

In the novel's closing chapters, Urania reveals what caused her to leave the Dominican Republic. Her father sent her to Trujillo, telling Urania he was sending her to a party when in fact, he had sent his 14-year-old virgin daughter to service the dictator sexually, in hopes of restoring himself to Trujillo’s good graces. After disclosing the truth, Urania prepares to return to New York. This time, she leaves the door open to family relationships; if her niece writes to her, she decides she will write her back.