Back from the grave

>> Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat resurrects a Dominican dictator

by JULIET WATERS

Right after Antonio de la Maza guns down Rafael Trujillo, the ruthless and legendary dictator of the Dominican Republic, de la Maza realizes he has also accidentally shot his own friend, thinking he was military police. "It was as if the earth had opened up, as if, from the bottom of the abyss, he could hear the sound of the Evil One laughing at him."

There's something creepy about the timing of the release of Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel. The Feast of the Goat, based on the historical facts of Trujillo's regime, came out within days of the crash of Flight 587, en route to the country Trujillo sadistically brutalized for decades. Reading it, I too felt as if I could almost hear his notoriously high-pitched laughter. As if somehow from hell, Trujillo had orchestrated a final revenge on the people who once idolized him, and now despise him.

If this X-Files scenario gives the impression that Llago's novel has elements of Latin American magic realism, let me correct that. Feast of the Goat is much too realistic. There is so much brutality in this story that the effect is numbing. Yet at the same time Llosa is such a hypnotic storyteller, it's a difficult book to walk away from.

Feast opens from the perspective of Urania Cabrel, a New-York-based lawyer who fled the republic as a teenager in 1961, the year Trujillo was gunned down in his Chevrolet. She has returned 35 years later because her father, a senator in Trujillo's government is near death. She is, however, not there to hold his hand. She is hoping to take advantage of this last chance to accuse him of selling his soul to a monster.

The Goat, as Trujillo was called, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961. Despite his sadism he was loved by many for turning the fortunes of the nation around. He created the most powerful military force in the Caribbean, doing away with the threat of invasion from Haiti. And he significantly reduced the humiliating power of the U.S.--which up until then had controlled customs, prohibited a Dominican currency and approved the country's budget.

At the same time, Trujillo plundered land and factories, kept his power in place through a relentless campaign of torture, helped himself to the wives and daughters of his ministers, and allowed his dilettante son to do the same, and worse. (Though Ramfis Trujillo did have to do some time in military school after his involvement in the gang rape of a teenage daughter of one of the country's most affluent families.)

Yet Trujillo's power was also based on something other than exploiting people's fear of death. As de la Maza observes, what kept people from fighting back was "something more subtle and indefinable than fear: it was the paralysis, the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man, groomed and adorned to the point of absurdity, with his thin high-pitched voice and hypnotist's eyes, imposed on Dominicans, poor or rich, educated or ignorant, friends or enemies." Trujillo had an almost Satanic ability to manipulate good, competent and decent men into doing things they could later never forgive themselves for, thus keeping them under his spell.

Urania's story, which is woven into Trujillo's rise and fall, poignantly illustrates the terrible legacy of violent regimes. Decades later she is unable to forgive herself for her father's sins. She cannot let go of her obsession with Trujillo, leaving the impression that Trujillo in many ways still has absolute power over her life.

But as we find out in the last pages, Urania may have been one of the few Dominicans to actually witness Trujillo's tears. Of all the terrible things Llosa reveals about Trujillo, the worst may be that he wasn't a demon, or a ghost, but a human.

The Feast of The Goat by Mario Vargas llosa, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, hc, 404pp, $39.95