The Goat's Party (novel)
La fiesta del Chivo is a novel published in the year 2000 by the Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The book takes place in the Dominican Republic and focuses on the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the subsequent events, from two points of view with a generational difference: during the planning and after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout history, there is an intense reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s, and its meaning for the island and its inhabitants.
The story follows three intersecting stories. The first concerns a woman, Urania Cabral, who is back in the Dominican Republic, after a long absence, to visit her ailing father; she had left the country, to go to the United States, and on her return she recalled incidents from her youth and revealed a long-hidden secret to her aunt and her cousins. The second story focuses on the last days of Trujillo's life, from the moment he wakes up onwards, and shows the inner circle of the regime, of which Urania's father was once a part. The third is about Trujillo's assassins, some of whom had been loyal to the government, who are waiting for the dictator's car on the night of the attack; then the story focuses on the persecution of him. Each aspect of the book reveals different points of view of the Dominican social and political environment, both in the past and in the present. And the repercussions of the dictatorship on the island and the world.
The reader finds himself in a story with a downward spiral, the assassination of Trujillo and the events that followed as seen by his inner circle, conspirators, and the memories of a middle-aged woman contemplating her past. The novel has a multiple (kaleidoscopic) narrative technique about dictatorial power, including its psychological effects and its long-term impact. The novel is thus a portrait of dictatorial power, including its psychological effects, and its long-term impact. The novel's themes include the nature of power and corruption, and their relationship to machismo and sexual perversion in a rigidly hierarchical society with rigid gender roles. Memory, and the process of remembering, is also an important theme, especially in the narrative of how Urania remembers her youth in the Dominican Republic.
Vargas Llosa intertwines fictional and historical elements: the book is not a documentary and the Cabral family, for example, is completely fictional. On the other hand, the characters of Trujillo and his assassins were created based on historical records; Vargas Llosa weaves a structured story with chapters that alternate between the memories of the protagonist, General Trujillo himself and the people who committed the attack. In the words of Vargas Llosa, "this is a novel, not a history book, so I took many, many liberties. [...] I had to respect the basic facts, but I changed and distorted many things to make the story more persuasive; and I have not exaggerated."
Context
La fiesta del chivo is the second novel by Vargas Llosa that takes place entirely outside of Peru (the first was The War at the End of the World). Also somewhat unusual for the author is the fact that for the first time he has a female protagonist: Lynn Walford wrote about the central character of the novel, and of the following book by Vargas Llosa, Paradise on the Other Corner, "both are largely unlike any of the other female characters in their previous novels".
The people celebrate with great enthusiasm |
The novel examines the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo was, in the words of historian Eric Roorda, "of an imposing influence on Dominican and Caribbean history," which was "one of the most stable regimes of the 20th century," during his thirty-one years in power. from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo had trained with the United States Marine Corps during the United States occupation of the country, graduating from the Haina Military Academy in 1921. After the Americans left in 1924, he became the head of the Dominican National Police, which, under his command, became the Dominican National Army and Trujillo's personal "autonomous power base".
Trujillo was officially the dictator from 1930 to 1938, and again from 1942 to 1952, but he retained effective power. The regime's thinking was generally nationalist, although Daniel Chirot commented that it had "no particular ideology" and its social and economic policies were basically progressive.
The novel takes its title from the popular Dominican merengue They killed the goat, which refers to the murder of Trujillo on May 30, 1961. Merengue is a musical genre created by Ñico Lora in the 1920s, which was actively promoted by Trujillo himself. At present it is considered the national music. Cultural critics Julie Sellers and Stephen Ropp consider this merengue in particular, which fantasizes about the dictator turned into an animal that could be turned into a stew (a frequent dish in Dominican gastronomy), the song "gives those who are singing, listening and dancing this merengue a feeling of control over themselves, who have not had the experience of living during those thirty years". Vargas Llosa quotes the lyrics of They killed the goat at the beginning of the novel.
Plot
The novel's narrative is divided into three distinct strands. One is centered on Urania Cabral, Dominican, totally fictitious; the affairs with the conspirators in the Trujillo assassination; and the third in the same Trujillo. The novel alternates between these three stories, and jumps from 1961 to 1996, with frequent flashbacks about the beginnings of the dictator's regime.
The Fiesta del Chivo begins with Urania's return to her birthplace in Santo Domingo, a city that had been renamed Ciudad Trujillo during the time of the dictator in power. This thread is a lengthy introspection and factual retelling of Urania's memory and his inner turmoil about the events leading up to his departure from the Dominican Republic 35 years ago. Urania escaped from her during her regime in 1961, under the tutelage of some nuns who took her to study in Michigan. In the decades that followed, she became a prominent and successful New York attorney. She finally returns to her country in 1996, a yearning, and she finds herself compelled to confront her father and elements of the past that she had long ignored. As Urania talks to her ailing father, Agustín Cabral, she remembers more and more of the anger and disgust at her that led to her thirty-five years of silence. She remembers the fall of her father from grace in the political arena, until she reveals the deceit that unites her narrative thread with that of Trujillo.
The second and third threads take place in 1961, the weeks before Trujillo's assassination on May 30. Each murderer has their own backstory, explaining why they decide to take part in the plot. Each of them had felt attacked by Trujillo and his regime, by his torture or brutality, by blows to pride, religiosity, morality and, in one case, a matter of love. Vargas Llosa weaves the story of the dictator in the form of memories recalled the night of his assassination, when the conspirators wait for the Goat. Interconnected with these stories are that of one of the most famous Trujillistas of that time, Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president; Johnny Abbes García, the ruthless leader of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM); and various others; some real, some partially inspired by historical figures, and some purely fictional.
The third thread concerns Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina himself, regarding his actions and thoughts. The chapters focused on the Goat recall the most outstanding events of his time, including the murder of thousands of Haitians in 1937. The country's international relations during the Cold War tensions are also highlighted, especially with the United States under the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and Cuba under the rule of Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa speculates on Trujillo's thoughts and recreates the image of a man whose body is beginning to fail him. Trujillo is tormented by incontinence and sexual impotence. Eventually, this thread connects to Urania's narration when she reveals that she was sexually abused by the dictator. This, he fails to get an erection with Urania, and, in her frustration, rapes her with her hands. This is the key fact that embarrasses Urania and that would lead her to detest her own father. In addition, this is the cause that keeps Trujillo angry, since the "unsavory girl" witnessed his impotence and his emotions, and it is the reason that motivates him to go see another woman, to sleep with her, the night of his murder.
In the final chapter of the novel, the three narrative threads intersect frequently. The tone of these last chapters is especially dark and they focus mainly on the torture and death of the assassins at the hands of the SIM, the failed coup, the rape of Urania, and the concessions of Trujillo's hardest supporters allowing them to carry out carry out his horrific revenge and then escape the country. The book ends with Urania preparing to return home, determined to keep in touch with her remaining family on the island.
Characters
Present
Urania Cabral and her father Agustín Cabral are both presented in both the present and past tense. In 1996, Urania returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time since he left the country at the age of 14. She is now a prominent New York-based lawyer who has spent the last 35 years trying to forget her childhood traumas, something she pursues with an academic fascination with Dominican culture and history during the Trujillo era. Urania is deeply self-conscious about the events of her past, and she decided to confront her father Agustín de ella regarding her participation in such events. Urania visits her father, and finds him weak from age and from a serious accident, so much so that he can hardly notice her presence and is unable to respond to her, letting her speak as if he were a monologue. Agustín listens helplessly as Urania recalls her past as "Brain Cabral," an important member of Trujillo's inner circle, and his fall from grace. Urania details Agustín's role in the events that led to her being raped by Trujillo, and her subsequent emotional trauma and celibacy. Agustín's character in the novel's present serves as a sounding board for Urania's memories of the era of Trujillo and the events surrounding Agustín Cabral's misfortune and escape from it. Her only responses are minimal and non-vocal, despite Urania's accusatory fervor and the enormity of the events during the Trujillo era.
Trujillismo
Rafael Trujillo, known as the Goat, the Boss and the Benefactor, is a character with fictional elements but based on the real dictator of the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961, officially as President of the Republic only between 1930 and 1936, and, again, from 1943 and 1952. In La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa imagines the thoughts of the dictator and tells the last hours of El Chivo from his own perspective. Trujillo fights against aging and problems of incontinence and impotence of psychological origin. Through fictional events and a first-person narrator, the The reader finds himself immersed in the man who, during his "thirty-one years of horrific political crimes", modernized the country's infrastructure and its armed forces, but whose attacks on enemies abroad (particularly the assassination attempt on Romulo Betancourt, President of Venezuela) led to the imposition of economic sanctions against the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States in the 1950s. The result was an economic debacle that, along with other factors, led the CIA to support the plot that killed Trujillo on February 30. May 1961.
Trujillo's figure and sympathizer is Johnny Abbes García, the head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), a brutal man who is indicated as responsible for "disappearances,... executions,... sudden falls from grace ». Abbes and his intelligence officers are known for their cruelty, particularly their habit of killing dissidents by throwing them into the sea to be eaten by sharks. Colonel Abbes «...can be a demon; but it serves the Chief: everything bad is attributed to him and Trujillo only the good.” Trujillo's son, Ramfis Trujillo, is a loyal servant of his father. After failing to try to study in the United States, Ramfis returns to the country to serve in the army. He is a renowned womanizer. After Trujillo's death, Ramfis is determined to seek revenge, even going so far as to torture his uncle-in-law, General José Román, for his participation in the assassin's plot.
Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo's puppet president, is one of the regime's sympathizers, and initially portrayed as an innocuous character with no real power. After Trujillo's death, Balaguer's calm and serenity take a turn, and General Román comments on him that he is an insignificant man, seen as an employee, a purely decorative figure, who suddenly begins to acquire authority. This is the Balaguer figure in the last chapters of the book.
Conspirators
The narrative line concerning the assassination primarily follows the four conspirators who directly participated in Trujillo's death. Antonio Imbert Barrera is one of the four conspirators who survive the violent reprisals of the assassination. Imbert is a politician who is disillusioned by the cruelty and deception of the Trujillo regime. His first plan to kill Trujillo was thwarted by an attempt by Cuban paramilitary forces to overthrow the regime. Convinced of the difficulty of the task, Imbert must join the other conspirators in Trujillo's death, such as Antonio de la Maza, one of Trujillo's personal guards. Antonio's brother is assassinated as part of a set up carried out by the government and Antonio swears revenge against Trujillo; Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, known as "Turco", is a devout Catholic who, outraged by Trujillo's crimes offensive to Catholicism, vows to attack Trujillo. Turco's concern becomes that the regime does not torture his family in response to the murder. Both Turco and his brother, innocent of him, are tortured for a month. His father remains faithful to Trujillismo and personally reproaches Turco. Despite everything, Turco refuses to commit suicide and does not lose faith in God. He is later executed by Ramfis and other important government subjects. Turco's close friend, Amado García Guerrero, known as Amadito, becomes an army lieutenant who must abandon his fiancée as a test of loyalty to Trujillo, and is later forced to kill the brother of his lover, in that same sense. Amadito's disgust with himself and disillusionment with the regime lead him to collaborate in the conspiracy. After the murder, he goes into hiding with de la Maza and is killed during a confrontation. After the murder, Amadito and Antonio de la Maza choose to confront the SIM members who are chasing them in order to arrest them, opting to die fighting them than to be captured and then tortured.
Main Themes
The main themes of La fiesta del Chivo include corruption, machismo, memories, and power and writing. Olga Lorenzo, critic of The Melbourne Age, points out that all these components have helped Vargas Llosa to reveal irrational forces that have encouraged despotism in Latin American countries.
Corruption
The structure of Dominican society is hierarchical, with strongly defined gender roles. Rafael Trujillo, the leader, is a cruel dictator who terrified the country for 35 years until his death. He is a true warlord, ruling under brutality and corruption. He has created a cult of personality in a capitalist society and further decadence in his regime. To achieve promotion and greater responsibilities, an officer or one of his servants must pass a "loyalty test". his supporters remain loyal at all costs, being subjected to public censure and humiliation, even making disloyalty unusual. Trujillo rapes women and girls as an expression of his political and sexual power, and there have been cases where he takes the wife or daughter of one of his lieutenants, most of whom are blindly loyal. Even the Church and military institutions are used to provide women to the dictator
Almost all of the assassins have been directly linked to the Trujillo regime or have been fervent supporters, only to find that the regime used them to commit crimes against the population. In an interview, Vargas Llosa describes the brutality and corruption of the Trujillo regime: «He had more or less all the traits that all Latin American dictators have in common, but taken to the extreme. In cruelty, I think he went much further than the rest; and in corruption, too."
Machismo
According to literary scholar Peter Anthony Niessa, two significant behaviors of machismo are aggressive behavior and hypersexuality. Aggressive behavior is demonstrated through displays of power and strength, while hypersexuality through sexual activity with all people as many as possible. These two components shape the portrait of Trujillo and his regime in La fiesta del Chivo. As Lorenzo points out, Vargas Llosa "reveals traditions of machismo, abusive parents, and child-rearing practices that repeat themselves and shame children, so that each generation bequeaths a withering of the soul to the next."
Reflecting both aspects of machismo, Trujillo called on his aides and cabinet to provide him with sexual access to their wives and daughters. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about Trujillo's machismo and his treatment of women, "[he] goes to bed with the wives of his ministers, not only to show that he likes those women, but also to test them. He wanted to know if they were prepared to endure the extreme humiliation. Mainly the ministers were prepared to play that grotesque role; and they remained loyal to Trujillo even after his death."The dictator's sexual conquests and public humiliations of his enemies also serve to reassert his political power and his machismo. In Niessa's words, "The implication is that maximum manhood equals political dominance."
Trujillo's desire for sexual conquest of Urania is an example of political manipulation of Agustín Cabral and of sexual power over a girl. However, Trujillo's phallus remains flaccid despite the sexual encounter and he feels humiliated in front of her, unable to satisfy her machismo.
Memory
All the threads of the novel novel refer to memory in some other sense. The most apparent confrontation with memory is with Urania Cabral, who returns to Dominican territory for the first time in 30 years, and is forced to confront her father and the traumas that led her to leave the country at the age of 14. She was the victim of sexual abuse by the dictator himself, a sacrifice her father had to make to win back the dictator's trust, a fact she alludes to throughout the book, but is only fully revealed at the end: the The play ends when he tells his aunt and cousins, remembering, who never knew the real reasons why he left the country. When her aunt is surprised by the detail of that night, she replies that, although she forgets many things, "I remember everything about that night." For Urania, forgetting the atrocities committed by the regime is unacceptable. Her father, on the other hand, he is not able to join that process, since he has suffered a stroke; however, she Urania is angry that he chose to forget about her when she still had the ability to remember.
Memoir is also important in the passages of the novel concerning the murder. Each memory leads the conspirators to take part in Trujillo's assassination. Some of these events include the 1956 kidnapping and murder of Jesús Galíndez, the 1960 murder of the Mirabal sisters, and the 1961 break with the Catholic Church. These historical events are used by Vargas Llosa to connect the perpetrators with historical moments that reflect the violence of the regime.Trujillo also remembers his past, not least his education and his training with the US Marines.
Above all, Mario Vargas Llosa uses the fictional Urania to facilitate the memory of the regime in the novel. The novel begins and closes with Urania's story, effectively fragmented in her narration in the form of remembering the past and her understanding of the present. Furthermore, thanks to her academic study of Dominican history under Trujillo, she confronts in the present what that government was for the country as a whole. This is one of the purposes of the book, which is to ensure that the atrocities of the dictatorship and the dangers of absolute power are remembered by the new generations.
Facts and Fiction
The novel is a combination of historical and fictional facts. Fusing both elements is considered important in a historical novel, but especially in La fiesta del Chivo because Vargas Llosa chooses to narrate an event in the present tense through both fictional and real characters. Some characters are fictional, and those that are real keep fictional aspects in the book. The general aspects of the murder are real, and the murderers were real. When they await the arrival of the dictator, they mention crimes that occurred at the time, such as the murder of the Mirabal sisters. However, other details were created by Vargas Llosa, such as the murder by Amadito of the brother of the woman he loves.
Those who sympathize with the regime are a network of real and fictional characters. President Joaquín Balaguer is real, but the Cabral family is completely fictional. According to Wolff, Vargas Llosa "uses history as a starting point to construct a fiction of the state of the "spiritual colonization of Trujillo" about the Dominican Republic and his experience in a Dominican family." The fictional Cabral family allows Vargas Llosa to show two faces of the Trujillo regime: through Agustín, the reader realizes the dedication and sacrifice towards the country's leader; through Urania, the violence of the regime and the legacy of pain that he left behind. Vargas Llosa created the inner thoughts of those non-fictional characters, especially regarding the dictator. According to the writer Richard Patterson, «Vargas Llosa expands into the depths of the "dark area" of Trujillo's conscience (as the narrator conceives it)."
Vargas Llosa built the image of a regime shaken by historical events. On the historical accuracy of the book, Vargas Llosa has declared that «This is a novel, not a history book, so I took many, many liberties. The only limitation that I imposed on myself was not to invent anything that could not have happened within the framework of life in the Dominican Republic. I had to respect the basic facts, but I changed and distorted many others to make the story more persuasive; and I have not exaggerated."
Reception
The realistic style of La fiesta del chivo is recognized by some critics as a break with the allegorical approaches of works of the dictator novel genre. which were willing to sacrifice historical accuracy for outstanding storytelling.
A common comment on the novel is about the graphic nature of the acts of torture and murder that are depicted in the work. Vargas Llosa offers the reader the realities of an oppressive regime with a degree of detail that is not usually used by other Latin American authors, in this sense Michael Wood suggested in the London Review of Books: «Vargas Llosa...... tells us beyond an everyday intrigue, and the sordid, sadistic minutiae of torture and murder." Walter Kirn of The New York Times commented that these "lurid scenes from dungeon interrogations and torture sessions" cast other aspects of the novel in a pale light, draining them of their importance and impact. Similarly, for Kirn it means that the "narrative machine" mentioned by Wood becomes a both unmanageable, producing a superfluous plot. The narrative thread centered on Urania Cabral is described by Sturrock as the emotional center that the novel focuses on, and Wood agrees that her confrontations with her demons manage to capture the reader's attention. against In this, Kirn's view is that the Urania segments are "spoken and atmospheric...[and] seem to have been borrowed from another type of book."
The vast majority of criticisms refer, directly or indirectly, to the relationship between sexuality and power. Salon analyst Laura Miller, The Observer writer, Jonathan Heawood, Kirn, and Wood each detail that this is connected to Trujillo's progressive loss of power, from his body to his followers. The allegory that Trujillo reinforces his political power through sexual acts, and begins to lose conviction as his body fails him, is something of frequent discussion in critics.
In 2011 Bernard Diederich, author of the 1978 historical book Trujillo. La muerte del Chivo, accused Vargas Llosa of plagiarism.
Accommodations
In 2005, a film adaptation was made in English, directed by Luis Llosa, cousin of Mario Vargas Llosa. Isabella Rossellini as Urania Cabral, Paul Freeman as her father Agustín de ella, Stephanie Leonidas as Uranita and Tomas Milian as Rafael Leónidas Trujillo stand out. It was filmed in both the Dominican Republic and Spain. Reviewing the film by Variety magazine, critic Jonathan Holland opined that it was "little less than a three-course banquet, hastily put together.", but completely enjoyable", commenting that the main difference from the book was the sacrifice of psychological nuances.
The novel has also been taken to the theater, a dramatic version performed by Jorge Alí Triana and his daughter Verónica Triana, and directed by Jorge Triana: it had its premiere —in Spanish, but with simultaneous translation in English— at the Repertorio Theater Spanish from New York in 2003; the production was brought to Lima in 2007. A notable change from the theatrical version is that it is the same actor who plays Agustín Cabral and Rafael Trujillo. For the analyst Bruce Weber, this would mean that "Trujillo's power over the nation depends on his cowardly collaborators."