A Barbarian’s Feast

dimensional story unravelling through several narratives, it flits back and forth between 1961 and 1996, between the personal and the political, between absolute power and absolute powerlessness.

The ‘‘Goat’’ in question was known as the Benefactor, Excellency, Generalissimo, Chief, Father of the New Nation. Also, the Devil. Mario Vargas Llosa is too sensitive to portray in black and white the brutal dictator General Rafael Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. He dwells on the shades of grey mostly very dark grey. His fictionalised account can be trusted, for he is one of the most conscientious writers of the times and a Latin American politician (he ran unsuccessfully for president in Peru). The Goat plots, robs and kills, bleeds his country and his people for money and machismo, and instills such fear in his subordinates that they bring him ritual offerings of their own wives and virgin daughters.

The main narrative is of Urania Cabral, the daughter of a Trujillo loyalist. She had fled to the US at 14, just before Trujillo was assassinated, and has come visiting 35 years later, to discover that her intense loathing for Trujillo and his cronies is undiminished. She is probably the only invented character in the book, but her experiences are all too real. What happened to her had happened to hundreds of Dominican women under the Trujillo regime; the hatred she has nursed for 35 years reflects the long-term effects of the dictatorship. The other narratives are set in 1961, recreating the final days of the Goat, his slaughter, the savage reprisals that followed, and finally the belief that democracy was on its way. The voices of the dictator’s assassins are juxtaposed with that of Trujillo himself. Trujillo, who according to legend, never sweats, never sleeps, never has a crease in his uniform, never loses control over anything. Except his bladder but then, that’s not part of the legend.

An important historical novel of our times, The Feast… is more than a gripping tale of political intrigue and personal loss. It’s a reminder of less fortunate times, a warning to the world about the dangers of absolute power. In this age of international intrigue and ‘‘hidden hands’’ the grand drama of this vile dictator who rapes and plunders is so crude that if it weren’t true, we wouldn’t buy it. Vargas Llosa excels in recreating the ambience of an era when people surrendered the right to resist and actually cooperated in their own ruin, most poignantly in the rape of their daughters. But in his enthusiasm to blame the Goat, he oversimplifies the aftermath of the dictatorship, and though one strand of his novel runs through 1996, he doesn’t take advantage of hindsight. He doesn’t talk of the US interventions which devastated the Dominican Republic, or even of the way the US had installed Trujillo as a safe anti-communist leader in Latin America, only to arm his killers 30 years later. The puppet President Joaquim Balaguer is depicted as a mild-mannered, sly, scholar and poet. The book ends with him welcoming freedom and democracy. Not a word about Balaguer’s atrocities, the decades that saw the murder of the opponents of his ‘‘democracy’’ students, union leaders and journalists till he finally retired in 1996, blind, sick but still enormously influential thanks to US backing. Whew! Thank god we have democracy. Our human rights and civil liberties are protected. Killing, raping, slashing bellies, torturing, setting homes on fire just happen in The Feast…. Politicians grovel to stay in power as the state manipulates mass murders.

Yes, we do watch the news. So maybe the Goat is not dead and the feast continues in little pockets here and there, gaining strength, waiting.

(The writer is Editor, The Little Magazine)