The Feast of the
Goat
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Edith Grossman
Faber and Faber, London, 2001
£ 10.99, Indian Price £ 6.50
In an interview given to Gabriel Garcia
Marquez sometime after the Zapatista peasant rebellion in Mexico in 1995, its
masked Marxist leader sub commandante Marcos explained that after Cervantes and
Shakespeare it were the contemporary Latin American writers who moulded the
minds of his generation. Besides Garcia himself and others, he named Mario
Vargas Llosa, quickly adding that he influenced, “despite his ideas”.
This somewhat cryptic comment
heightens the tribute to Llosa as he was the right wing presidential candidate
during the Peruvian elections in 1990- an election that brought Alberto
Fujimoro to power and infamy. But more than that, Llosa has been for decades
the most eloquent literary voice from Peru, its leading storyteller, a novelist
in the magical realist genre of Jose Borges, Garcia Marquez, Isabelle Allende
and a host of other Latin American novelists.
The novel under review is the latest
offering from Llosa- it is a tale woven around the last days of the Dominican
Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the tiny country with an iron hand
for thirty-one years before his assassination in 1961. For most part of his
reign he had been supported by the US administration and hailed as the bulwark
against Communism in Latin America. His brutality and ruthlessness was
legendary as was his mania for cleanliness.
It was in the backdrop of Fidel
Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolutionary movement that the US started to distance
itself from a dictator who had destroyed all institutions in the country and
supplanted them with a single one- himself. His highly blemished record on
human rights left little options even for the US to support him.
The novel, in Llosa’s trademark style
of interleaving multiple narratives and sequencing of events across time
describes the events as seen through the eyes of his detractors and
conspirators, Trujillo himself and most pertinently, through the eyes of Urania
Cabral, daughter of a former Trujillo confidant and who left the country at the
age of 14 after her father had fallen into disgrace.
The conspirators are mostly drawn from
the circle of the middle level functionaries in the Trujillo administration and
personify the old adage that a system falls not only when those who have been
left out in the cold oppose it, but when those at the helm realize that the
system is no longer sustainable and their convictions crystallize sufficiently
for them to join hands and overturn it. Trujillo’s assassins are mostly the
second-generation beneficiaries of the regime, those who have not known any
other system except Trujillo’s blood- sucking tyranny.
On the other hand, Trujillo sees
himself as a man of destiny who has been directed by God Himself to lead his
country out of the darkness into a modern civilized nation. He fancies that his
countrymen would still be living in the dark ages were it not for him. Indeed
with the help of his benefactor, the United States, he did manage to bring
symbols and elements of modern life to his country.
Urania Cabral who returns to visit her
country for a week provides the third perspective. She returns to the Dominican
Republic after 35 years as a 49- year old spinster, a leading professional who
has worked with the World Bank and now lives and works in Manhattan with a
leading law firm. Why has Urania never married? Why has she never responded to
the numerous letters written by her father, relatives and friends over the years?
Why does she continue to detest her father who supported her financially as
long as he could and helped her to leave the county?
Llosa keeps the reader guessing as he leads him into the
intricate maze of the plot and sub- plots. Llosa’s style has elements of a
classical symphony- a fugue that keeps on playing till it stretches the reader,
only to reward him with a crescendo as Urania’s reasons for her strange
behaviour become chillingly transparent.
The novel ends with Trujillo’s
assassins being let down by the Chief of the Armed Forces who had agreed to
proclaim a civil- military takeover after Trujillo’s assassination. He has been
so tamed in all these years that he finds himself incapable of taking the right
decision at the opportune moment and only ends up being implicated and brutally
tortured and killed by the former dictator’s vengeful son. All but two of the
conspirators meet an identical fate.
Trujillo’s family is allowed by the
former puppet President Ballaguer to shift millions of dollars out of the
country (a step that Trujillo never took himself nor allowed his family to
take). The former dictator’s protégés transition the country to a democratic
state, under the benevolent eyes of the US administration.
Who finally won? Was it Trujillo who all
said and done and despite his brutal assassination at the age of 70 had had the
opportunity to put his country on the fast track to his conception of a modern
country, whatever be the actual effects of his regime?
Was it the conspirators who despite their
capture managed bring an end to the brutal regime? Or was it the protégés who
followed the dictator all his life, reaped the benefits under his tutelage and
then survived his assassination to emerge as the leaders of the democratic
nation?
Urania Cabral, despite the horror that
will hang over her all her life does manage to escape to the US and live an independent life.
Is it, yet once again, the victory of
political chicanery that wins over courage and brilliance?
Llosa does not pose this question himself
but the reader is automatically led to it. It is the same question that Llosa
has asked again and again in his works. Most notably in his epic tragedy “The
War of the End of the World” as well as lesser known works like “Death in the
Andes” and in “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta”, a novel that places itself in
a sort of a trilogy with Joseph Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” and Arthur
Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”.
In his attempt at examination of a
Latin American dictator and paint his fictional portrait, Llosa brings to mind,
most obviously, Garcia Marquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch”. In its
portrayal of those close to Trujillo the novel brings to mind Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle”.
In the story that Llosa has chosen to
tell in this novel, the reader is left with multiple versions of the truth and
no one-dimensional answers. As in his other works, the reader is left
perplexed. Llosa has raised as always, disturbing questions that haunt and
leave us groping for answers.
21
Oct 2002
Bhupinder
Singh
This page was last updated on: 18 January 2002